You may have guessed I am a bit of a fanboi when it comes to the works of Satoshi Kamiya:
As previously stated, my wife and I spent some time in a rainforest cabin and that inspired me to have a go at his Lyrbird – a deliciously complicated crumple that needs to result in a characteristic fan tail, 2 side tail things, wings, legs, body and head.
Sir Terry Pratchett, one of my favourite authors, imagined a world like no other, a “disk” world, held aloft on the back of 4 gigantic elephants, standing on the back of a giant star turtle called “Great A’ Tuin”:
The breadth of imagination, depth of character, intricacy of story arc and obvious love he lavishes on his books are an amazing legacy. Everyone who is a fan starts somewhere – for me, it was the book “Mort” but there are dozens, each clever, funny and beautifully written.
When presented with such a lovely TURTLE it seemed only natural to attepmt to pay homage to a literary favourite of mine, so set about assembling the component bits. It was as if the stars had aligned, having just folded ELEPHANTS I set about making 4 of them, only to realise they were too big and so made 4 smaller ones.
The disk was paper craft – a circle of cardboard, MAP of Diskworld on top, covered with paper, toilet roll holder cut to be support and bracket that elephants could rest on and a balance for the pitched back of the turtle – voila.
I am quite chuffed with the end result – partly because it matches the image I had in my head, partly because it works as a whole, and is able to be dismantled to boggle and the component parts as well.
I posted photos on terry Pratchett’s Facebook page, I hope he sees them – I hope the model brings his even a small amount of the joy his writings have brought me.
Tomoko Fuse is undeniably a genius, her work with exacting spiral forms unequalled:
This is her “Nautilus”, a lovely recursive form that, after the pre-creasing, almost folds itself.
Elegant and graceful curve, perfectly planned pleats and a tidy shell end make this model a keeper for sheer geometric beauty alone.
I want to pretend that I go tthis first try – truth is I folded a set of folds wrong way round first go (bloody Japanese instructions), but restarted because I wanted to make the model (so sue me)
Will be folding this again – would love to fold this in large format, will see how I go. really happy with this – who said geometric sequences were not beautiful (it is just mathematicians that wring the joy out of them :P)
It has been fairly wild weather here in Brisbane, oddly as flood levels rise we awoke to bright sunlight – dams and mitigation schemes still to interact with the tides to peak our water levels.
Thought it might be nice to inject a little ray of sunshine into the otherwise bleak situation:
This is my first attempt at this model – another exercise in pre-folding where if you get it right, most of teh design just falls into place as if by magic.
I saw demoed on Youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHMZtIwiWRQ and thought was pretty neat – a lovely geometric that you can have a go at – we need all the sunshine we can get at the moment.
Some development shots:
So it is raining, and there are storms and floods, so how better to mirror that than with an articulated Origami model – this is a storm cloud, it’s lightning bolt snaps up and down.
…it was late, I was tired
