Spirals have most recently been explored by Tomoko Fuse, but lovely spiral shail shells have existed in traditional origami for a long while before that:
This is Eduardo Clemente’s snail, well, one of them. As a bi-colour model it cleverly manages the 2 colours ensuring the soft slippy bit of the snail is one colour and the rounded spiral of the shell is the reverse. Continue reading
I must admit to liking folding insects in Origami – something about the extreme paper wrangling necessary to separate out features from the sheet is a great challenge:
This is Eduardo Clemente’s “Mariposa” or Butterfly. An interesting fold indeed. Continue reading
It is rare that with relatively few folds the essence of a 4 legged beastie is so well captured:
This is a continuation of the exploration of Eduardo Clemente’s work, his simple pig, charming little critter it is. Continue reading
Yoshizawa Sensei once said “The Horse and the rider are not one, nor should a model of them be”, or words to that effect and I think this model is an interesting reflection of that sentiment:
This is Eduardo Clemente’s “Burro con Carro” which I think means “Donkey and Cart”. Fashioned from a 3×1 rectangle, the technique involves completely wasting the middle square to provide a join that more or less makes sense between the cart and the tail of the donkey.
The trouble is, the join is so thick that modelling the hindquarters of the donkey is compromised, the cart does not sit quite right and the front of the model is so light that modelling front legs and head/ears is flimsy and a bit of a fail. Continue reading
Sometimes tending the nest is more important than what is happening elsewhere:
This is Edwardo Clemente’s “Mother Bird” (I think that is what it is called, it is all in Spanish) and is a charming little bi-colour model that manages to tease a lovely flappy mother twitter bird, a pair of hungry chicks and a colour contrasted nest from a single sheet. Continue reading
Under the weather at the moment, folding while suffering a streaming headcold is not much fun. After 2 model fails, I thought I should go simpler:
I stumbled across an obscure book by Eduardo Clemente called “Papiroflexia”, it is full of historically revolutionary designs I must try. Continue reading
Modular stars are a thing, there are many beautiful ones including multi-sheet omega stars (8 pointers), but this little beauty is crafted from a single uncut square:
From a sunken waterbomb base we tease xyz planes then fashion points from their intersections – genius. Continue reading
I started this fold near the end of last year, shelving it when the marking hit it’s peak and realised I had not got back to it:
Playing around with a tiny (4mm) triangle grid, initially I was just testing my patience and accuracy to see how small and accurate I could fold the grid. The paper contains a lot of cotton fibre so is pretty tough and withstood a week of punishing bone-folder-assisted creasing before I then tried to work out what to do with it. Continue reading
Prehistory must have been an amazing time, evidence of such fantastical beasts continue to boggle the mind. The air was full of ferocious snappy things, land was populated by ferocious snappy things and the oceans were the same:
This is Lu Hao’s “Plesiosaurus”, a rich, dense and interesting fold that results in a serpentine necked swimming snappy thing after a complex process of hiding most of the sheet. Continue reading
There is a mystical beast called a Narwal – the unicorn of the sea:
I am lead to believe this is a real critter, and their nose horn seems (at least from photos I fond on Google) to be impractically long but there you go – evolution is an odd natural force. Continue reading
When I was a kid, apparently I used to call elephants “Nollentonks”, not sure why but there you go:
This is Chuya Miyamoto’s Elephant, a wonderfully complex fold that, like most folds of this critter, focuses on the head and trunk first then sorts a body out of what paper is left. Continue reading
Who could have foreseen that the concurrence of a series of parallel mountain folds interspersed between a series of concentric parabolic valley folds would result in something with such sculptural simplicity?:
This is Jun Mitani’s “Spheroid”, well, at least as close as I could get to it by guessing the intervals between parallel lines and the curve on the parabolic ones. Continue reading
Brickwork tessellations are a bit of work, but it is nice to see a model that uses the tessellation as the texture of another structure:
This is Ichiro Kinoshita’s “Fireplace by Brickwork”, a torturous fold that requires a ton of pre-creasing and as the scale I chose (square cut from an A3 sheet), the final crease lines end up about 4mm apart on fairly heavy paper – not, in retrospect, a good choice. Continue reading
We are heading into assignment season in many of my classes – this means my students are busy getting on with it, occasionally asking for help, but I am stuck there inert and when I get bored I get naughty:
…so I fold stuff to keep me awake. Modulars have an advantage that, once you have mastered the module, it is largely “rinse and repeat” until the final assembly. Continue reading
Potter Nerds and Minecraft Nerds unite, for I present to you a “Minecraft” style cubey golden snitch:
This buzzy little bugger would be difficult to catch in a full on game of Quidditch indeed. This is Riccardo Foschi’s “CuBird”, an interesting little CP that collapses with a little wrangling to make a lovely little cube and enough paper to fan out a quite solid set of wings. Continue reading
