Chaos 4: The Quidditch Accident

So as I was saying I decided to crush an origami cube around a clay sphere to see what fold patterns arose and it was surprisingly informative. In a shortish time I was able to emulate some of the patterns to make similar curves to the ones that naturally occurred from the crushed cube.

It wasn't until I came close to finishing the more egg shaped spherish thing that i realised what I had done. The excess paper turned out to be very wing like and it was looking very Harry Potter Quidditch Snitch indeed.

I apologise for this and can only say I learned my lesson and made a more cauliflower like version to atone.

I am now working on making more robust versions of my platonic solids that can be crushed around spheres to make more hideous creations.

Chaos 3: The Origami Sphere 1

Sorry to have skipped Chaos 2 but that is an origami fly that involves folding the entire fly model, dissassembling it, folding it in half, crushing it, uncrushing it, and refolding it. The design is one of the first I have illustrated by hand and I will find the drawings soon and post it.

So... Chaos 3: The Origami Sphere 1.
I have a plan to make an origami sphere. Much like any 'plan' with origami such an idea takes a long time to articulate. I like the idea of an origami sphere as it is the perversity of taking a flat square and constructing the purest of curved 3D objects from it. This has lead to frustration and the image I have as my profile is in fact one of my early crushed pieces where I realised I could crush a piece of paper into a closer approximation of a sphere than I can fold one. It does irk me that I could not refold such a piece but as a base line it is strangely helpful.

So recently I had the idea of crushing an origami cube (better known as an origami balloon) around a clay sphere to see what folds it produced. And that is exactly what I did.

Chaos 1: The Crystal Flower

I just like grand headings I think. In origami there is room for chaos. That is to say it is possible to make a design that incorporates random elements. This is currently helping me resolve a long term goal which I will explain later but I thought a few older pieces of random origami might be good. I have made a few 'wrong' origami things in my time by, for example, starting a paper crane with a crease that is not down the middle and then trying to make all the other folds work. It is possible and I have made cranes and crabs this way that are quite wrong looking. From this exercise was born the crystal flower. This piece involves picking a random point on the paper. Then you fold creases between that point and each corner. Then you bisect these four creases by making valley folds from the original point and lining up the corner creases. Strangely this makes a sort of chaotic base that is a bit like the traditional square base. From this you flatten the four mountain folds and make petal folds a bit like making a frog base. and then you have an origami crystal I think like the dark crystal but that is just what my mind does.

If you unfold all of these petal folds , flatten the paper and push the point of origin the whole piece can be inverted. By starting with the smallest petals and folding them internally the flower is formed - an abstract non symmetrical mutant flower but a flower all the same.

I am not sure why I used black paper for this but I did resist inverting the image to make it look strange so at least that is good.

Waterfall 2

As I said in my last post I have remade the waterfall but less regularly.

I know that is not a great description but the photos should fill in the gaps.

Strangely the waterfall from the last post now reminds me more of a shambling Lovecraftian monster that moves through the weird angles in space and time. I think that may just be me.

The Wallet 3

These two designs are a bit insane. They developed from the corner listed in the last post.

Images 1 & 2 : the ziggurat fish. This half made bouncy ziggurat has the impression of a more organic object thus the 'fish'. This is odd as it is a working model for a more complex ziggurat with a ramp or steps up one side.

Images 3 & 4 : waterfall. When I made the steps using the same corner fold I enjoyed its solid architectural feel. If you fill a page edge to edge with corned folds the pleating and splaying are conversely very organic. I may make a less regular version of this.

That about wraps it up. That wallet is now refilled with crisp unfolded paper and I will try to post more about what I am doing along the way. I have three other wallets but that is getting ridiculous.

The Wallet 2

Image 1 : corner. This is an origami corner I use in things like my ziggurat, cowboy hat and the Eiffel Tower I made in Paris but found out had almost fold for fold been designed by someone else earlier.

Image 2 : umbrella investigation. I was looking at the construction and folding of an umbrella and am working towards a similar plan for a sheet of paper and this is one of the accidents I came across on the way.

Image 3 : intertwined snakes. That is a reaching description of this development from my new base fold which I have yet to figure out how to make into something less abstract.

Image 4 : centipede segment. I think I will do a class on how to fold this piece. It is a segment of the centipede I came up with a while ago. If I got 50 people to make one each and we link them together (that is part of the design). We could make the hundred legs I have been very slowly working towards on my own.

The Wallet 1

I was thinking that I just haven't posted in a while and that might imply that I do not do origami very often. This sadly is not the case. I am posting here the contents of my origami wallet. A small plastic envelope ( kindly gifted to me by Rachel ) that contains about 100 pieces of memocube paper. I often fold something and then unfold it and flat-pack it back into this wallet. I went to find a fresh piece of paper the other day and realised there were none. So last night I emptied out the wallet, refolded the origami pieces in it and have photographed a few of them here. Due to the limited number of images I can include per post this may take a few.

Image 1 : parabola. I have worked out that not only can you make an approximate parabola by folding one edge of a sheet of paper to a central point but that this can be be used as a basis for approximating the intersection of two curved planes. That is as close as I will ever get to explaining that.

Image 2 : double inverted corner. This is similar to my ashtray design but with a second inversion of the 3 corner faces.

Image 3 : axolotl head. This is an old favorite. I made it and tried to make a body but have failed to do that well so made a series of animal heads on mounts. I just made this again to remind myself of how it is done.

Image 4 : Squid in construction. This is a partially finished squid. I cannot remember why i started this or why it isn't finished but my tube probably came into the station. I made a squid the other night for a friend, Gen. It is fun to show off.

1(a... (a leaf falls on loneliness)

1(a

le
af
fa
ll

s)
one
l

iness

by E. E. Cummings

This is a piece that I recently made and use as a bookmark. This is is good for the origami as it compresses the piece much more neatly into a flat leaf and because it is functional which makes me happy.
I like the fact that the edges of the paper are the edge of the leaf, this is surprisingly rare in models I have seen.
I also like the fact that the back still has the overall shape of a leaf but the silly amount of folding becomes like the complexity of veins in a leaf. If you hadn't noticed I am quite chuffed with this design.
The poem is one that my partner introduced to me before we started going out, it is nice to have a model to go with it.

Virtual Origami

Sorry about the blogging splurge. Lots of old ideas to share but new stuff is happening.

I have been obsessing about virtual interpretations of origami for some time now. I have recently undertaken the mind bending project of making a 3d model of the hellraiser flower I wrote up in 2008. The inspiration is the idea that if models can be made of these objects then maybe someone can explain to me how to apply the geometry of movement to a 3d model so it can be animated. This would make the animations I have made much simpler to generate. I personally think the future of origami on the web is 3d models that you can get to fold in an animated way to get past the incomprehensibility of most advanced origami instructions.

So here is the hellraiser flower reinterpreted as a 3d object and posed to look like the images I posted of the real origami object. And I have also posted the sketchup model here which I can rotate in my browser but I am not sure how accessible this is.

Story Arc 4: Aerodynamic Bird

This is really a story about the pace of origami design and thought.

Last year I held a demonstration where I showed a group of varying ages and abilities some of my designs through a step by step instructional course. As with all these things participating in the performance denies any objective understanding of how it went. Suffice to say I was left with a sense of inept fumbling on my part.

There were to moments which really stuck in my mind.
Firstly; the boy who got bored and made up a great flea design of his own while waiting for me to teach him how to do a scorpion was truly humbling.
Secondly; one of the other boys quite reasonably asked if the bird I was folding could fly. Now the more mature audience quickly poo pooed the idea that it should and we carried on as if the question had never happened. The kid was right. Why not. We make paper planes that look nothing like planes but they fly. That is their job! Oh, from the mouths of babes grrrr.

So six or so months later while playing with the new base I have been working on I made this bird. I Have to admit that the look is a bit chunky but when I made it from a 21x21 cm (squared up a4) sheet it was aerodynamically sound!!!

My sister and I tested it of the roof of my studio building. It flew! A bit wonky like any paper plane but it flew.

Story Arc 3:New fold

So this wave on the edge is a bit boring and I quickly moved to experimenting with it, I had tried to do it on 2 and 4 corners of a piece of paper thus the bulls head and bowl designs in the earlier post.

I then moved on to making the wave pattern work symmetrically towards the center. This is hard to fully explain so the crease pattern here and the subsequent images are hopefully clearer. The practical upshot is a new base fold pattern for me to work from.