Mary Alice Casto, assistant professor in textiles, merchandising & fashion design, created an assignment prompting students in her color theory studio to use artworks on display at Sheldon as source material.

Closely studying the values, hues, and saturation of color in works of art, as well as how artists use different strategies to organize their compositions with color, students then developed their own tessellated repeat patterns based on an artwork of their choice. Casto could have set the students out into the world to find color combinations and patterns, but felt that artworks at the museum provided better structure—and good models—for students to work with.