What kind of techniques and mediums was Escher using at this time?

So Escher was mostly a printmaker, so always two-dimensional, uh, so on paper.

And I like that, Marcus, that you just mentioned sort of this mixture of 3D and 2D because Escher loved playing with making something like a piece of paper, just a two-dim- or a three-dimensional image also.

And Escher was really a craftsman, so he loved the woodcut, he loves lithographs, and especially the woodcuts I always enjoy explaining because it's so difficult and technical.

Um, Escher would have a block of wood.

He would, uh, draw an image on it, and he would gouge the whole block of wood.

So he would cut the image out, and then he would put some ink over the top layer.

Tell us about the-

But what, what have we got apart from squares?

Well, [laughs] so if you boil it down to the basic possibilities, um, you can think of having one kind of tile which you then use throughout your design.

Those tiles, and our favorite kinds of ones as mathematicians, are regular ones.

So like a square, all the sides are the same length, all the angles are the same.

Another example would be the regular hexagon that, that, you know, bees love to make their honeycombs out of.

So it's got six sides, and all the sides are the same length, and all of the angles are the same, 120 degrees.

Uh, another example is an equilateral triangle.

What kind of techniques and mediums was Escher using at this time?