Four-Colour Cobblestone Panels

These four-colour cobblestone panels can be used to tile a wall or other surface. Each colour set is printed separately, allowing this project to be completed on a single colour printer.

Print out one of each “Cobblestone” file in your selected colours

There are three “Base” options provided. “Base – Loose” will likely require glue to hold the cobblestones in place. Depending on your materials and settings, “Base – Snug” and “Base – Tight” are designed to allow cobblestones to be snapped in to place.

This project began as a design challenge to program a model using a “Four Colour Algorithm.” In mathematics, the four-colour theorem states that no more than four colors are required to color the regions of any “map” so that no two adjacent regions have the same color. This project was particularly complex because in order to tile 2D space, the edges of each panel “loop” over to the opposite edge when calculating colour assignments of neighboring cells. This means that the four-colour algorithm used to assign colours was run on a torus graph of the cells that were then used to create the cobblestone pattern.