Big and small frogs are closely packed into a star formation. Based on the Kite and Dart version of the Penrose Tiling, the red-eyed frogs are coloured in gold, teal and green. The entire star is also rather frog-like..it is easy to see the five-lobed shape as having a head and four webbed feet.

Frog Star III is based on a print that was presented by me to Roger Penrose in 2007 in a wonderful visit to Oxford where we talked tessellations for several hours. He kindly said it was the best tessellation he had seen based on his tiling. In this tiling, the tiles are coloured with the minimum number of colours which ensure that no tile touches another of the same colour, the 3 colours combined with the 5-fold symmetry of the design creates an interesting tension between order and randomness. Roger Penrose asked me if there was a substitution method to generate the colouring, so far I have not found one, instead I must do it manually to avoid any adjacencies between tiles with the same colour. Of course with 5 colours it would be easy, but there is beauty in making do with the least – the principle of parsimony.

Compared to the Pen-Rose artwork in the same series, this tiling is all about stars rather than pentagons – this is due to the start point – start with darts or the small rhomb and you get a sequence of stars. Start with the big rhomb or the kite, and you get a sequence of pentagons.

Frog Star III is a larger patch of tiles, which shows off the fractal nature more strongly. The brushed gold aluminium gives the piece a shimmering highlight to the spines of the frogs, highlighting stars and pentagons amongst the design.