Using Islamic patterns to make spherical art

I've been fascinated with Islamic architectural patterns since I first saw them. I like how the angles repeat and connect. Following the those angles around with your eyes can put you into a meditative state, which might be why they are most often found in mosques.
Here's an example:

I thought it might be fruitful to combine their geometry with that of the polyhedrons I use to make spherical art. The way I went about it was to break down the patterns to their smallest repeating components that would fit into a hexagon or a pentagon.
Here are three examples that I created after studying patterns I found online:

Then I mapped the patterns onto each of the facets of a hexagon sphere model in my 3D program..

Once they were applied to the sphere, I changed their mode to stencil. This made all the white space around the patterns transparent. Then I place a camera inside the sphere, looking out, and experimented with different lenses. Here are three examples:

The following images were made this way and colored in Photoshop:

This art was previously posted by me on Twitter and Instagram. Here are links to my accounts:
Twitter: http://twitter.com/spherical_art
Instagram: http://instagram.com/sphericalart

<<previous post ------------------------------------ next post>>

Let me know what you think!