Cruising around on facebook, as you do, I saw a call to test a new Kusadama by Ilja Trochanowski:
I put my hand up and set about folding the 6-piece cube, an interesting intricate design based on an octagonal collapse with some fiddly treatment of the flaps to make curly floral facets.
Continue readingThere is a story of a deeply depressed man who, when seeking help from a psychiatrist, was given the advice that he should cheer himself up by seeing the visiting clown, the great “Joseph Grimaldi”. With the suggestion, the man wept more intensely. “I am Grimaldi”, he said.
I am terrified of clowns, just putting that out there. That said, I saw this little CP of a “Pierrot” with a silly hat and decided to procrastinate even further and attempt to fold it.
Continue readingSo GOT has started again, the final season and it is a promised shitstorm between people and the undead (sorry, if that is a spoiler).
It seems ALL of the trouble of the resident ice-zombies was caused by an experiment between a man and a race called “the children of the forest”, and some dragon glass, but that plot point will be explored further I guess as the series winds up. This mask reminds me of what I imagined the children of the forest looked like when I read the books.
Continue readingLooking for a rose-based box for a gift, I came across Tadashi Mori’s tutorial for this fold:
Made of “curler” units, the rose-like structure on top of the box required 4 squares. The box lid also requires 4 squares, the base also – 12 squares all up.
Continue readingCruising around on Fakebook, as you do, I came across a module that seemed really familiar. I am sure I have seen it elsewhere, but am not able to find it (I think it is a Bascetta variant?):
I decided to give it a whirl – nice and simple, and quick to fold, it locks nicely with a positive paper tension keeping groups of 3 together, then you group the 3-unit points into clusters of 5 and you get a nice positive curvature. Using other combinations I can imagine zero curvature (6 modules) and negative curvature (7 modules) … hence a torus is possible?.
Continue readingMy second test fold from a book by Tetsuya Gotani, this time a “Nollentonk”:
I say “Nollentonk”, only because my sister, when young, used to call elephants nollentonks – not sure why.
This lovely folding sequence carefully hides white right until the emergence of the tusks via a clever colour change. The morphology of the model emerges as distinctly elephantine fairly early on and some of the moves that isolate features are delicious.
Continue readingI have the honour and privilege of being asked to help edit a new origami book by Tetsuya Gotani. The first diagram I did was of this beautiful Styracosaurus:
I started with a 60cm square of patterned Kraft, and after a bunch of collapses to make a bewildering collection of isolated points.
Continue readingThe remnants of a pack of Daiso washi was sitting in my cupboard and i am not sure, so I start folding Fumiaki Kawahata’s Triceratops (from Origami Tanteidan Magazine 57) and realised why it was unused:
You assume that paper is square, and start folding, only to discover in some dimensions it is really not square, but you persist none the less, kludging landmarks as you go.
Continue readingRiffling through boxes of stuff from our kid’s Kindy years, we came across a cache of artworks my Son painted. Being too precious to throw out (and long since removed from the fridge), I set about cutting it up into 2:1 rectangles – LOTS of them:
I then arbitrarily folded them into a modified unit based on one I used that was designed by Tomoko Fuse.
When you have a little time, and 90 bits of paper on hand, you should have a go at this delightful brain-breaker designed by Daniel Kwan:
This is not my first attempt at this model, back in 2011 I folded it in white, and decided to re-work it in colour.
Continue readingI love a good modular, and this little charmer uses a module not completely unlike “the little turtle” combined to form a rather lovely cube-like thing:
I decided to use wood-grain paper, and the result looks like the work of a woodie with way more time on their hands than is healthy.
Continue readingI have been looking for tidy self-contained folds based on A4 paper that hides the raw edges, so I could try my lovely thistle-based hand-made paper (from the ladies at Paper Makers and Artists):
This box looks like a traditional fold, but seems to be credited fairly recently to Sweet Paper, a paper art shop/tutorial site I stumbled across in my musings. Not sure of the attribution however, as many of their featured designs I have seen (and folded) from other artists.
The paper, with lovely rough chopped scotch thistle fibres and other pulp is fairly crisp, fairly thin but had raggedy (beautiful) decal edges that I did not really want to have to chop off.
Continue readingAs a Christmas present, my daughter signed me up for a Lino-cut and print-making workshop – something I was interested to try for the first time:
Originally I had a much more ambitious plan, but it was deemed not achievable in the allocated time in the workshop so I sort of freestyled it.
Continue readingCulling stored stuff, we came across things we had kept from my daughter’s pre-school years. Folios of precious artworks that, 25 years ago, adorned our fridge:
Glorious and colourful explorations of paint, colour and form, painted, using bubbles, marbles, brushes and other techniques, using really strong colours that have remained so all this time.
I chose 10 of the most colourful paintings, cut 3 x 1:2 rectangles and set about folding a nice spiked ball with them.
I love the result, for all sorts of reasons, but mainly because it is made from materials created by someone I love. So much better than sending it all to landfill.
I was approached by a mate mid 2018 with the idea of an original origami commission, but was given no real timeline (which for an OCD procrastinator like me is a recipe for a little crazy time.
The end result, finished near the end of February 2019, is vastly different from how I had initially envisaged it. It was actually really hard to part with this one – so much creative energy went into it’s genesis.
