So today I got up at 3.30am to catch a shuttle bus to the other side of the city at 4.30am so I could register for the charity walk I had agreed to accompany my daughter on:
35kms later, we made it to the finish line and most of my bits currently hate me. I need new legs – sadly Boney M’s legs are a little small but his look a lot more stable than mine are at the moment. Continue reading
Every body needs a good engine house, a solid “ticker” and this rib cage assembly is a masterpiece in modular origami:
Vertebrae lock with rib bones, these link into a sternum (breast bone) and provides linkages to neck, shoulders and lower back – genius.
Made from 13 squares, 4 bird-base inspired vertebrae, tubular ribs and lovely pleated breastbone, this is my favourite part of BoneyM so far. Continue reading
…so I am embarking on a mega-structure fold, the aim is to complete a humanoid skeleton. After crowd-sourcing ideas, I went with the name “Boney McBoneface” (or Boney M for short):
We start with the head, noggin, pate, gourd, dome, brainbox, melon, block, nut (feel free to insert other colloquialisms). As this megastructure involves a total of 49 sheets, and is logically grouped into joints (as a butcher would call the bits they render a carcass) and I decided to work from top to bottom. I felt there was too much folding of wildly different sorts for this structure to count as ONE fold … so sue me. Continue reading
Looking for something to fold that was vaguely “insecty”, I stumbled across a lovely box-pleated fly mangled from a 2×1 rectangle:
Based on a 16×32 grid, we isolate head, legs, lovely plump abdomen and leave the back flap for a lovely set of wings. Continue reading
Anyone who knows me realises I am a HUGE Alien fan (well, except for Alien 4 – The Apology) so I find it irresistible when I find an Alien-related fold:
This is Makoto Anzai’s “Face Hugger”, a snarly hand-inspired ovipositor that is the precursor to a chestburster. Similar to Fernando Gilgado’s model, this one has a different fold morphology. Continue reading
So I have been really busy, with meetings and … stuff, so I fell a little behind. Looking to catch up, I noticed a lovely group of folds designed by David Brill:
This is Cat, Mouse, Cheese – a naturalistic composition with a pair of lovely fold-related critters and a lovely wedge of cheese. Continue reading
Busy times indeed – perfect for folding a 12 piece modular:
Fairly simple modules that sit over one, inside another adjacent module, locking fairly positively into swirls of 4 “petals”, you get a shape that describes a cube when you look just at the points. Continue reading
Few would argue that the Tsuru (crane) is the quintessential origami figure. Everybody starts there, the form is so familiar and the skills necessary to fold it form the backbone of so many models:
While I have tried many variations of this model, few compare to Riccardo Foschi’s “feathered Tsuru”, a glorious and complex variation with such beautiful wings. Continue reading
Looking around for a chess board in origami was fun, there seem to be a few out there, including a few that use only 1 sheet of paper and a million creases to perform the necessary colour changes for the squares:
I discovered I could not source paper large enough to make a playable chess board, so looked for alternatives and stumbled across Joseph Wu’s modular chessboard. Continue reading
Continuing my exploration of origami butterfly form, I realised there were a bunch of folds from the book VOG2 that I had not attempted yet:
I tortured a thin bit of hand-made washi for 2 hours, turning it inside out, backwards and every which way but the resultant form is lovely indeed. Continue reading
I want to pretend that we have a discernible Autumn in Brisbane, indeed there is a moderation of temperatures, but we lack the temperature drops and seasonal flora to clearly mark the change of season:
Having been places that have deciduous trees, and seen the glorious colour changes in leaves from yellow to red and all colours in between I appreciate the milder climate but miss the beauty. Continue reading
Origami seems to be the new Materials Engineering black, being considered a contemporary alternative approach to fabrication and structure:
I was reading an article on deploying large solar arrays in space. This problem is not unique – everything taken into space must be small at launch so it can fit in a rocket. Continue reading
Having folded Robert Lang, Jun Maekawa and Ronald Koh’s Rabbits, I feel I have been a bit spoiled in terms of “best” rabbits out there:
Always on the lookout for something new, and given that it is Easter Sunday, a rabbit seemed appropriate and this rabbit gave me an interesting challenge. Continue reading
Those who know me realise I am mostly a “cat person” but my parents used to have Bassets, lovely dogs that were low to the ground, long ears and seemingly wearing a skin that was 5 sizes too big:
I have been looking for a good Basset hound model and, up until now, have not really found anything suitable.
Scanning the State Library (and learning you can e-borrow their collection) I stumbled across an archived copy of Seth Friedman’s “Dog Origami”. The last (and presumably most complex) model in the book was a Basset, and I have spent much of the afternoon trying to fold it. Continue reading
I am such a fan of David Brill’s work:
His command of seemingly impossible geometry is complimented by the works of Francis Ow, the designer of the other “Double Cube” I have folded – a torturous skeletal structure. Continue reading
