By Michael Hartley
Any triangle can be used to tessellate the plane. The most symmetric tessellation comes when you use equilateral triangles. Then, you get a pattern with all the same symmetry as a tessellation by regular hexagons. You can see that by joining the centres of each triangle to its neighbours - and a tessellation by hexagons will magically appear!
You can draw a tessellation by squares by drawing two sets of parallel lines, at right angles to each other. You can also draw a tessellation by equilateral triangles by drawing three sets of parallel lines, at 60 degrees to each other. You have to be careful, as you draw them, that the third set of lines goes through the intersections between the first and second sets. Of course, it's easier to find a website - like this one - with downloadable triangular graph paper for you to print out!
I've made a whole bunch of tessellations of equilateral triangles of different sizes for you to download and print. Choose the size you want, and download and print yourself some triangular graph paper using the links below. Each download is just a single page. The size given is the size of the edges of the triangles. Want something besides triangles? Check out my Graph Paper Page instead.
- 1mm Triangular Graph Paper
- 2mm Triangular Graph Paper
- 5mm Triangular Graph Paper
- 1cm Triangular Graph Paper
- 1/24 inch Triangular Graph Paper
- 1/12 inch Triangular Graph Paper
- 1/8 inch Triangular Graph Paper
- 1/6 inch Triangular Graph Paper
- quarter inch Triangular Graph Paper
- 1/3 inch Triangular Graph Paper
- half inch Triangular Graph Paper
- 1 inch Triangular Graph Paper