Chevron Blocks
A heightfield of cubes, seen corner-on, where every edge is a chevron.
Clock, date, widget row and the two bottom controls, drawn where iOS draws them.
Previewing with 8% bleed, as exported. Seed chevronblocks-001.
Which pattern you are looking at. Tap the preview to move to the next one and round again; the seed and the palette come with you, so the same words draw the same idea four ways.
The edge of one cube, as a fraction of the canvas width. Everything else is derived from it, so this is the only control that changes how many blocks there are.
How far the stacks differ in height. At zero every stack is a single cube, the walls disappear and the pattern falls back to the flat diamond tiling underneath it; high up it becomes a landscape of terraces and deep shaded steps.
How Chevron Blocks works
A cube seen corner-on is three rhombi: a top face and two sides meeting at a vertical edge. Draw that edge and the two faces either side of it and you have a chevron; stack the cubes and the chevrons run into each other into columns of light and shade. The quilters got here first — this is the Tumbling Blocks block, pieced from diamonds since the 1850s — and the reason it has lasted is that the eye insists on reading a flat arrangement of sixty-degree rhombi as solid objects with a light source, even knowing better.
Underneath it is a heightfield rather than a tiling. Every cell of a square ground grid carries a stack of cubes, the stack heights come from fractal noise, and the whole thing is projected isometrically: one step across the ground moves the drawing half a cube down and √3⁄2 across, and one storey up moves it a whole cube straight up. Nothing here is drawn in perspective, which is the point of the projection — a cube at the top of the canvas is exactly the same size and shape as one at the bottom, so the pattern reads as depth without ever having a vanishing point to give it away.
Because it is a heightfield and not a pile of loose cubes, the visible geometry is small and exact. A column shows its top face, and it shows each of its two front walls only down to whatever its neighbour on that side has reached — below that the neighbour is in the way. So the drawing is the surface, never the inside, and there is no need to sort or hide anything: the walls are exactly as tall as the step between one stack and the next. Relief is the height of those steps. At zero every stack is one cube tall, the walls vanish and what is left is the flat diamond tiling the projection started from; wind it up and the surface breaks into terraces.
The three faces of every cube are one accent at three lightnesses, not three different colours: face light is the spread between them, and keeping the hue fixed is what makes the light read as light rather than as decoration. Mortar insets each face by a hairline of the background, which is the difference between a stack of blocks and a single faceted surface — at zero the faces meet directly and the pattern tips back toward being flat, which is worth looking at too.
