There 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 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 readingIt 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).
Origami dragons and wyverns seem to be a bit of a “holy grail”, with the more complex gaining almost mythic reputations for breaking folders spirits when they attempt them:
I came upon the diagrams for this charming model shared on fakebook, and it took a moment to hunt down the designer – Shaku on Flickr. Continue reading
I am still on the lookout for a nice travel fold – something I can leave as a stealthy “thankyou” to the hosts of places we will stay overseas:
This is Seiji Nishikawa’s Kangaroo – an amazing 3 part modular that I decided to try folding using hand-made paper.
The model is in 3 parts – upper body and lower body are folded with the same size bit of paper, the joey is a similar fold to the upper body folded much smaller. Continue reading
Continuing the modular bent, I had bookmarked this fold in my collection of Tanteidan magazines as a “must try”:
This is Jun Maekawa’s “Spikey Cube” – a 6 part modular that only holds itself together when the last part is slotted in place. The locking mechanism is difficult to master initially, and seemingly different each corner. Continue reading
David Huffman is a bit of an origami enigma it seems – he pioneered a bunch of tessellations and surface corrugations and seems to be one of the first to explore curved creases and their bizarre effects on flat sheets:
This is is “Arches” tessellation, an intriguing offset brick valley folded grid that then has parabolic mountain folds at each intersection. The resultant sheet is really hard to tidily collapse (in my experience) – perhaps it was the paper or the scoring technique I used to form the parabolas, or perhaps it was the parabola itself – with no guidelines I just sort of guessed a curve.
You get a sort of waterbomb base forcing one trough deep into the arch of an adjacent fold – when it is tidied up it is fascinating – I could see uses for this as an interesting textural pattern or ambient light panel as it makes funky patterns when backlit. Continue reading
Now I am as much a fan of Game of Thrones as the next person, but I do like a good ice zombie as a baddie:
This is Nick Robinson’s “Hairy Man”, but I think it is much more demonstrative of an icy undead monster. Continue reading
I saw a photo sequence of a tessellation that was fashioned into a box and knew I had to try it:
Well, I say tessellation, but really this is just one molecule, but it is none the less beautiful. Continue reading
People process loss in different ways. 10 years ago a friend lost her fight with cancer and I am still saddened by the loss of such a bright and affirming soul:
While I could not bring myself to attend a memorial mass, none the less I still feel the loss. I chose to find solace in the many wonderful memories of a friend and confidante. Continue reading
EDIT: as a kind reader pointed out, I have already folded this model, so it cannot count as one of the current 365. It is a relief on 2 fronts (1) Someone is reading and (2) This fold of this model is vastly superior to the original
Some call me a dinosaur, they may be justified but if I am even half as cool as this Triceratops, then it is all good:
Designed by Jun Maekawa, this delightful little dinosaur is one of my +favs so far in that it has all the triceratopsy features (3 horns, flat plate head, stocky body, lovely proportions) and still remains simple enough to achieve easily with a 40cm square (prolly smaller with more nimble fingers)
Continue reading
Recently I had the privilege to see Humpback Whales lounging and playing in Hervey Bay:
I was determined to fold a Humpback, but only really found one designer that had designed something that even remotely looks like a Humpback. Highly tapered body, hooked dorsal fin, soft bellows-like throat, tail fluke – this model has it all.
Made for duo paper, this model has white bits in roughly the right places but none on the underside of the tail, oddly. Continue reading
Looking for today’s fold, I returned to a collection of bookmarked models from my growing collection of Tanteidan magazines:
Made of 4 tetrahedral modules, each with deep tabs along a pair of adjacent sides, you then fold a pair of interlocking preliminary bases as the core. Continue reading
Speaking of fractals, as I was (well, kinda sorta) I realised I had never tried the Fujimoto Hydrangea fold before:
This is an interesting thing, with each iteration folded inside the previous – in theory you can keep folding this infinitely. In reality the tryanny of paper thickness and fat clumsy fingers stops you. Continue reading
Browsing a MiniNeo eZine that I follow, I noticed a rather interesting looking hexagonal flower and thought it worth a try:
You triangle grid a hexagon into 16ths, then put a hex twist in the middle, then add the swing-back on petals and tidy up the tessellation to make a swirl. Continue reading
