Researching tessellations, I stumbled across a paper, written by Helena Verrill (Queens University, Kingston, Canada) that generally introduced the concept and looked at a number of common tiling patterns, but the first CP is one I had not seen before:
I did a small tester and loved (fluked) the collapse, and decided to scale up to a full A3 sheet, starting with a square grid. Then nested adjacent squares are layed in on diagonals to provide odd inverse hinges.
I am quite happy with this, and if more ambitious, I would fold it much smaller on a larger sheet – it would make amazing dragon skin.
One of the interesting things about being associated with “Pinterest” is that their algorithms continually look for stuff it thinks will interest you. Given I only browse Origami, I get some interesting leads. I saw a triangle-based tessellation/corrugation and did a little digging:
Seems Ron Resch, in the early 1970’s, was heavily into paper-based corrugation and this design emerged around then. The basis of this fold is 2 triangle grids, one at twice the scale of the other, offset at 30 degrees to the other. It took me a couple of failed attempts to get the crease layout to work but in retrospect is is much simpler than it seems.
2019 is the Year of the Pig – a fresh page that you are free to form anyway you choose:
There are a pair of pig models in Tanteidan 172 I mean to try, this is the first – a wild boar piglet. Little known fact: boar piglets have stripes (presumably for camouflage) while vulnerably young.
How often have you been totally lost in something – you know, time passes and you are so involved that you do not notice the passing of it? This model ate time and paper in quantity:
A fascinating exercise in vertex isolation, from a square to tease so many points while keeping enough paper for a body, legs and head – wow, just wow.
I found the diagrams as an un-attributed set of images on Pinterest (one of the many bastions of copyright infringement) but could not find details of either the designer or the publication – hints peeps? News just in: This is Fumiaki Kawahata’s Tuojiangosaurus published in the book “Origami Fantasy”
I must confess to being in love with the process of folding, less with the final product. I have kept a small proportion of my folds, but there are some that I just cannot part with:
This collection of dragons makes me dizzy, and is a small selection of the dragons I have folded over the years. Hundreds of hours of folding are on display here – literally hundreds.
More importantly, nearly everything on the table is NOT to first fold – certainly they are the first “acceptable” fold I managed of each model – some were folded MANY times before something “acceptable” was reached.
The moral of this cautionary tale is two-fold: effort is it’s own reward and mistakes are opportunities to learn. If only the current generation understood these simple principles.
Curious things parents, we present certain things as fact and then later we say that they were little white lies, but truth is a slippery thing indeed:
Easter bunny, collector of kiddies teeth, stranger in a red suit causing toddlers to scream in terror when they are perched on their knee in supermarkets – what an odd tradition.
Lovely “santa” re-fold, faux 3D, designed with some lovely colour changes by Steven Casey – ’tis the season.
Over the last few years I have played with origami tessellations – the theory of a repeatable pattern that interacts with other repeats (molecules) is fascinating and a real testament to the accuracy of the pre-folding. As part of another project, I have been exploring triangle grids, and a devilishly tricky to collapse hex-cell tessellation by Robert Lang he calls “Honeycomb”.
Robert Lang’s Honeycomb Tessellation
After folding this a number of times, and then schematicizing the molecule, I noticed that “cells” were deep and, due to the nature of the collapsed layers inside I did not think they were very tidy nor kept their shape nicely. All to often, in origami design, paper thickness is disregarded in the theoretical collapse – in this case hiding away most of the paper in canyons between cells deforms them in ugly ways.
Original Lang molecule (right) and my shallow modified one (left) – same size paper
I started playing with the corner mechanism, and discovered I could halve the height of the cell wall, making the tuck much less bulky and doubling the size of the resultant folded field on the same bit of paper. Additionally it held itself together nicely with edges that are easy to stabilise. With a little practice (I am sure my work colleagues thought me obsessed, given the number of times I folded this tessellated field) I was ready to scale up … well, down in truth as I folded a “tiny” triangle grid on my target mustard leather-grain paper and then set the corner widgets before collapse only to then realise that folding this small was a real challenge with my nerve damaged, fat clumsy fingers.
CP of molecule (red=Mountain, blue=Valley) Thick lines are visible edges, thin are hiddenContinue reading →
For the last few months I have been working on parts of a project that will eventually be a framed collection or composition of some sort. Half of the fun is finding/developing models that suit but for this project I decided I would make paper for it also.
I started with Mark Kirschenbaum’s “Honey Bee”, primarily because it had the promise of a colour change to create contrast wings and a lovely stripey abdomen. Realising I had no suitable paper (going for a yellow/black vibe here) I laminated patterned black and yellow tissue to make a crisp double-tissue with little colour bleed. In retrospect the pattination on the black was distracting and, after going most of the way to folding a swarm I abandoned that line because the lovely detail of the bee was lost in heavy black paper patterns.
It has been a while since I last blogged a fold. Truth be told the end of the term beat me up a lot – coupled with a savage cold, auto-immune rash (I still have) and an infected tear duct, on top of the marking and reporting it beat me up proper:
That said, folding remains a refuge and I did fold a lot in the interim, just did not blog about it – must redress the balance.
I “found” a set of diagrams, well, stumbled across them on Pinterest (the largest bastion of copyright infringement) and decided it was worth a fold after seeing an unauthorised youtube video tutorial of the same fold (I must have skipped over it while scanning the document).
As a member of Origami USA, I get access to publications, diagrams and a community of folders world wide. It and JOAS are important communities for folders from Oz as we are so far (physically) from everywhere:
Every year, OUSA decorate a Christmas Tree at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. members are asked to contribute models to hang. Continue reading →
I hate throwing things out – having cut the biggest 2×1 rectangle possible from an A2 sheet, I was left with a lovely thin strip of scrap:
I was playing with a corrugation, with the view to design a millipede, but stumbled across a molecule that I then tessellated along the length. Continue reading →
Cruising around on Fakebook, as one does, I can across a photodiagram series from Naomiki Sato:
Lovely little hummingbirds, folded from 15cm square patterned paper, from bird bases.
I discovered he published a variation also, so thought I could give that a try. I think I like the wider tail one better, but they are both so cute. I have yet to see an actual hummingbird so have no real idea how morphologically accurate this is. Continue reading →
I have seen amazing geometric models based on Heinz Strobl’s strip-based modular technique called “Snapology”, and thought it about time I gave it a try:
Starting simple, I divided A4 sheets lengthwise into eighths, then gridded squares on those strips. I used grey for the core, 6×1 strips were cut for each triangular core. I used red for the connectors – 4×1 strips were cut for these.
The locking mechanism is simple, and in situations where the modules are tightly packed it just sort of holds itself together, but I can see how, with small extensions to the connectors you could easily and securely lock adjacent modules more securely. Continue reading →
Assignment time at school is fairly boring, for the most part, for a teacher. Students have lots to do, you need to be available to help on demand but there is a fair bit of sitting around waiting to be needed:
I had found a bunch of PDF’s explaining briefly how to fold parts of what I had assumed would eventually be a dragon. After trial folding the head and a foot I thought it was something I could do in stages. I (arbitrarily) decided my “standard square” would be the biggest cut from an A3 page. Most parts were then made using this standard.
Origami purists would probably have issues with this design, as there is an element of paper craft in some of the details, the head, for instance, is actually 1 standard square and 6 other bits of paper, folded and (shhh) glued in place. The body was made from 7 separate standard squares, 6 of which were the same, the tail segment was a little different to create the fan end.
I have been a fan of David Brill’s designs ever since I read his book “Brilliant Origami”. Such a lovely touch, breathing life into paper:
This Robin is delightful – I saw hand-drawn diagrams on David’s website and then professionally drawn diagrams in the latest Tanteidan Magazine and knew I needed to try it. I particularly like the free-form nature of the hand-drawn version, making it a bit more of an adventure to fold this bird.
The shape, management of colour change and general model stability is wonderful in this model. There is nice sense of volume, beautiful 3D head, and an animated pose. The subtleties in fold here are such that I found all 5 of them (yes, I got a bit carried away) are all slightly different, making almost a family grouping. Continue reading →
