Orchid

Hello Possums
It has been a long time.
That is to say hello Australia.  I have moved to Sydney and as part of our move we gave up all our plants in London.  A friend just sent me a photo of the orchid we gave her and it reminded me of this old piece.  This is a photo from years ago just after the orchid first flowered and after we cut off the stem I made an origami flower to make it seem less sad.

Akira 3

So lots of prattle and even the sequencing on Blogger has changed but here is what I was getting at with the Akira modeling.

I recommend clicking on an image then flicking through the three images.

Akira 2

Now Blogger is getting a bit random with its image allocation but we will try till it dies I suppose.

So... the Akira movie has a wonderful dancing computer graphic to illustrate the power of Akira. I think this dual colour paper model does a pretty job of illustrating the same thing.

That is actually all. I also think this is a much better resolution of the icosahedron I devised earlier.

Colour

Hello. I am afraid to say I have discovered colour. Especially colour one side and white the other. The capacity for contrast is lovely and if you print the colour by inkjet it gives such clearly defined fold patterns. Here is my tetrahedron in red and white. Hmmmm....

Akira

The Surrey Quays library opened recently with the all the fanfare that a library usually gets. None really. It had an opening and I didn't go and a few weeks later I went to see what my lovely partner was so excited about. ... You guessed it books.

Now you would think I would have searched out the new crafting sections and found all the
best origami books but no. I am much more basic than that. Comics. I am currently absorbing Robert Crumb's Book of Genesis and it is lovely. It however is not representative of the wonder of this new collection of comic wealth. There are series. I mean all of Swamp Thing, Sandman, Hellboy,Bbatman - killing joke, Lone Wolf and Cub, 20th Century Boys... and all of Akira.

At work I overheard a conversation about geodesic domes. ( Don't worry, this is still relevant.) I like the mathematics of geodesic domes. I like the fact that they are based upon the structural principal of spheres and I really like that they use the basic selection principal of the platonic solids. That all points on the shape correspond with points on the surface of a sphere. The arch is based upon this principal was later given another dimension by Walther Bauersfield and reinvented later again by Buckminster Fuller. At least that is what Wikipedia tells me.

This reminded me of my platonic solids and the annoying fact that I could never fully resolve the excess paper from the spare sides of the shapes except the tetrahedron. I remade the icosahedron and realised I liked the excess paper as a swirl. Like the Kawasaki rose but not as stable or as regular.

This blog only lets me publish 5 images at a time so I will post Akira 2 shortly.

Chaos 2: Scrunch Fly

Well here is the folding diagram I drew for the Stealth and Scrunch Fly that I previously mentioned. The diagram curiously starts after you have first folded the paper in a traditional union jack and then bisect two adjacent triangles along the top straight edge. I am not sure why I missed that out. But the description I gave before still holds. You fold the fly, undo it, fold it in half, scrunch it up, unscrunch it up and refold the fly now with texture.

This fits into my chaos origami style at an early stage as it is more textural than structural. This structural chaos is in the Crystal Flower and now the sphere experiments also mentioned recently.

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.