7x7 Blinky, Inky, and Clyde

Dario suggested I try to depict the four monsters (aka: "ghosts") from Pac-Man on four sides of a V-CUBE 7, but this was as close as I could get. I tried lots of color combinations, but most of them were impossible to make out. With the color scheme shown above you can almost see Blinky (the red one) if you squint and use your imagination.

I couldn't draw Pinky because the V-CUBE doesn't have a pink side. So my pattern ended up with an un-named green monster on the fourth side.

5x5x5 Dado Rail

The varying-width stripes remind me of the way a chair rail divides a wall between the dado below and the...uh... non-dado part.

But when viewed from a different angle it's easy to see this is just a simple 3-cycle pattern. (More precisely, it's two slightly different 3-cycle patterns.)

5x5 M.C. Escher's Pretzel

M.C. Escher used to draw all sorts of pictures of impossible objects like stairways that ascended in loops and waterfalls that drained into their own tributaries.

If M.C. Escher tried to draw a pretzel, it just might have looked something like this cube pattern.

5x5 Tropical Petals

This pattern occurred just by chance during my holiday in Hawaii. An Eastsheen cube naturally forms two groups of colors that look tropical: a red-yellow-blue scheme reminiscent of a tropical Macaw, and a white-purple-green scheme like an orchid.

The pattern itself is a variant of a standard snake, albeit with several modifications. The pictures were takent near Kona, Hawaii.

5x5 Grecian Urn 1

This pattern features two strings, one which weaves on-and-off the top of the cube and the other weaves on-and-off the bottom.

The picture doesn't make it entirely clear, so the schematic is shown at right.

5x5 Interlaced Spirals

My goal was to create a spiral path from the center to the outer edges. There's not more much to say about this one!

5x5 Dodecahelix

In this pattern, a string visits each face twice as it winds its way around the cube. The two green/yellow faces are turned a quarter turn from each other.
Since it's not entirely clear from the photo above, I've included a schematic diagram at right.

This is another of those patterns that's most interesting in person because you can follow the string around the cube. Or you can try, anyway. It's easy to lose count before following it around all twelve faces in the pattern!

4x4 Tricolor Python

This pattern is related to the 5x5 Quad-color Python pattern I posted a few months ago. It retains the off-center stripes, which were the most challenging part of the 5x5 pattern.

5x5 Flipped DNA

This pattern is a another double-helix like the previous Twisted DNA with a somewhat ore complicated color scheme. In this instance, the colors on each face are flipped onto each adjacent face. For example, the white face shown above has a green stripe and the adjacent green face has a white stripe. The white face also contains a red stripe, and the adjacent red face also contains a white stripe.

This color scheme extends around the entire cube, as shown at right.

Because the colors are flipped from adjacent faces, all six colors are visible when the cube is viewed diagonally. At left the trio of red-green-blue faces contain stripes in white-orange-yellow. Naturally the white-orange-yellow faces must contain red-green-blue stripes.

I used different color groupings from the previous Twisted DNA (which was white-green-orange and red-yellow-blue) because
it provided better color-contrast for this pattern.


Both patterns are best when viewed firsthand because you can trace the double-helix all the way around the cube...

5x5 Twisted DNA

A pair of threads twist over and under each other, wrapping around all six sides. Shown at right, the color scheme is based on two ordinary 3-cycle twists. It's essentially two snake type patterns woven together to depict a DNA-like double-helix.

Because the color scheme is based on a 3-cycle rotation, the cube shows three colors on three sides when viewed diagonally as shown in the picture at left.

4x4 Water and Fire

I named this simple 4x4x4 pattern for the 3-color groupings into cool and warm colors representing water & fire. I stumbled onto this pattern while playing with a big, cheap 4x4x4. It works pretty well, despite the cheap price.

Octahedron Gnostic Triquetra

That title is a real mouthful, isn't it?

Each face has a three-color triquetra arrangement, but unlike the previous Octahedron Triquetra each face is a mirror-image of each of its three neighbors. As a result, four faces show a left-handed triquetra and the other four faces show a right-handed triquetra. This arrangement resolves the agnostic edge, something that wouldn't be possible in a Pyraminx Triquetra pattern.

Of the platonic solids, only an 8-sided puzzle can divide the puzzle into two schemes where each face uses a different scheme from all of its neighbors. An ordinary Rubik's Cube can't do it. The Skewb Diamond (a different octahedron puzzle) can get half solved, so that each solved face was surrounded by three unsolved ones.

Octahedron Tri-color Triquetra

All eight faces of this Magic Octahedron depict a three-color triquetra pattern. It took me three tries to get this pattern right because there are so many sides and colors that I kept making mistakes. This color scheme integrates the trivial tips, rotating quadrants, and mobile edges on each face, but is edge-agnostic on adjacent faces.

The Magic Octahedron puzzle is more complex than the eight-sided Skewb Diamond puzzle, but much more versatile. According to TwistyPuzzles.com the Taiwanese version of this puzzle was called "Star Puzzler." Such puzzles are relatively scarce, but occasionally obtainable on eBay. (Or at a flea market in Berlin.)

5x5 Dino Delta

This pattern is created by choosing four corners and rotating the colors around them Dino-cube-style.

The result is similar to what you'd get by turning the same four corners on a six-color Dino cube, except for the diagonal lines.