Coloured Tiles

Continuing my fascination with the tiles used to decorate Islamic buildings, I find that my curiosity has got the better of me! You see, in nearly every case these tiles seem to be mainly blue in colour – whether for practical or aesthetic reasons I am not sure – so I decided to see what they would look like in other colours.

This image is a mixture of photos (some recoloured) and drawn images, trying to show the same design in a variety of hues. I had great fun with a few iPad apps to make these drawings and to change the colour of the photos, although I’m not sure that the overall image achieves very much. As for deciding whether the other colours might work as well as the blue on those beautiful oriental buildings, I’m not really convinced. The habit of using blue tiles might have started for practical reasons, but I think there is definitely an aesthetic argument to stick with blue.