The Book of Inkscape

24.2 Treatment 2: Tessellation

This treatment is easier to do than others because it’s mostly automatic. The only tricky part is creating the tessellation itself—that is, a pattern of complex interlocked tiles that cover the entire plane without holes or overlapping.

Draw a shape—any shape!—and create a pattern of tiled clones from it (Edit ▸ Clone ▸ Create Tiled Clones, 16.6 Tiling Clones) with any nontrivial symmetry group; in this example I used P3. At first, the clones do not form any kind of tessellation; it is your task to reshape the source shape—with its clones already in place— until the clones meet and smoothly interlock. It is much easier than it might seem; the fact that the clones immediately reflect any change in the source shape ...