Encaustic Medieval Tiles Pack

Masons at Winchester and Byland did not paint their floors. Instead, they cut a hollow into the red clay body, filled it with pale slip, fired the tile whole, and the figure came out in a second color with nothing in between. Our 84 encaustic tiles hold to that. Eagles, griffins, hares, and gothic arcades sit cut clean out of a solid ground, and the figure is a hole.

Details:

• 84 tiles in SVG, AI, EPS, and transparent PNG, numbered 1 to 84;
• 336 individual files, plus a master sheet of the whole set in AI and layered PSD;
• PNG files close to 2970 px square at 300 dpi, 8-bit RGBA;
• SVG, AI and EPS with flat fills, no strokes anywhere;
• five grounds across the set: slate, brick, brown, ochre and olive.

The figure is the hole

Each tile is one flat color with the motif cut straight out of it, and there is no second ink. The eagle, the hare, and the quatrefoil are all openings in the ground, and whatever is behind the tile becomes the drawing. Put a tile on cream paper, and you get the museum version. Put the same tile over a photograph and the photograph becomes the bird. Color covers between 45% and 67% of the square, so the heavy tiles work as solid blocks with a figure punched through them and the light ones read as line work.

Griffins, gatehouses, pomegranates

The set runs through the bestiary first: eagles, single and double-headed; griffins; lions rampant; wyverns; boars; stags; hares mid-leap; swans; a peacock; paired doves; and two fish in a roundel. Architecture takes the next group, like gothic arcades on fat columns, castle gatehouses, towers with a fleur between them. Then the charges: shields of fleurs-de-lis, crowns, a king in profile, a green man. Plants cover oak, vine and grape, iris, pomegranate, bellflowers, roses and a crowned tree. The rest is geometry, like quatrefoils, rosettes, interlace knots, basket weave and lattice. No drawing appears twice in the folder.

Lay them edge to edge

The tiles are square and the artwork runs to all four edges, which is what makes a grid work. Once you lay the same tile down nine times, a quatrefoil pattern runs across the joins as one field; alternate two and you get a checkerboard; set the banded curves side by side and the bands continue into the neighbor. The outer edge is hand-cut, not a ruled square, pulling in by about 1% of the tile at its deepest point, so a butted grid shows a hairline of background at every seam. Overlap the tiles a few pixels if you want the field to close up completely.

Usage:

Book covers and chapter openers, RPG and board game art, album and single artwork, brewery and cider labels, restaurant menus and signage, wedding and event stationery, apparel prints, museum and heritage branding, tattoo flash, and tiled web backgrounds.

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