Category: Origami

Cover Up

Great news! my book, Origami Animal Sculptures has gone to print. Last week was a flurry of even-more-minor corrections and finally approvals. The publisher sent my comps of the final cover including the back and the return flaps for the dust jackets. I finally got to read the endorsement blurbs from fellow origami artists John Montroll and Marc Kirschenbaum. I sent out the requests months ago. Thanks very much for your kind words, John and Marc. Also the back cover looks really great with thumbnails of the models taken from Bob’s photos.

Shepard Book

Last week I was extra busy cuz I got the third and final round of proofs for my book back from my publisher. By this point the layouts were all corrected and it was down little details like typos and subtle zoom issues on the steps. I had to make a few new corrections to some drawings, replacing a mountain fold with a valley or make a layer white. Out of almost 400 diagrams I only had to correct eight, so that’s not to bad. So it looks like this is. The next proof will be high-res pre-print master. Shiny!

Origami Animal Sculptures Pre-Order

Yikes! It’s mid-December already. Winter has come. Earlier this week we got our first real snowfall and today the first snow that stuck around for more than a few hours. Both kids had a snow day and I worked from home and tried to catch up on a few random tasks. It snowed again today and we’re fairly settled in under a blanket of white.

We’ve been really busy over here. I hope to catch y’all up in the next few posts. For now the news us you can now pre-order my book, Origami Animal Sculptures from Amazon and from B&N as well as from Tuttle. I’ve updated my web site with new links here and here too:

In related news, I got back a second proof of the book from my publisher and they implemented most of my recommended changes for typography and layout. We’re just haggling over the last few details. Hope to be done with that soon.

Origami Site Update

Yikes! It’s late November already. Winter coming soon. Tons of leaves all over nowadays and the trees are mostly bare. Hoping to get the Mustang out one more time. Run baby run.

Lots going on. Work had been busy with deadlines, planning and releases. I worked part of last weekend, and I’ve been slammed all week this week, but there’s the holidays coming up. Also the plus side, I’ve been learning Scala, which is the first really new thing I’ve done at work in a while. On the downside, I ran out of time over the weekend and didn’t work on my recording project. I’m getting close to finishing two songs, Is It Safe? and Now and Forever. Guess they’ll have to slide one more week.

I taught a Special Session at the museum last Sunday. My dog Timber and cat Sophie. Class went well. One of the students was a total whiz kid, and another was her dad, who’s not a folder but still did really well, although I had to explain everything in much more detail. I dropped off my models for the Holiday Tree and gave myself a quick tour of the museum while I was there. The dinosaurs and the whale room remain essential highlights.

I’ve been getting ready for a pair of gigs coming up with The Relix. We added a few new songs and have been sharpening up the ones we already have. Trying to get from a run-of-the-mill bar band to a truly awesome bar band. I think we have what it takes but it’ll take time to get that tight. Right now we’re in the better-than-shitty category. Looking forward to the shows. Should be a really good time and I expect we’ll get better each gig. So ya, lots of practice. I’ve been working especially on my singing.

This last practice our bass player was sick so I had to cover all the bass parts with my left hand. It went pretty well, in that my left hand has gotten pretty solid and I was able to cop a fair imitation of most of the bass lines. However, the sound wasn’t the same, and I don’t know all the songs as well as I’d like, so there were a few “I’m thinking” clams, especially when I was singing too. Nevertheless it went pretty well, and Mike will be back for the show, and I got an interesting new perspective on the songs. I’ve been practicing soloing in Light My Fire over the bassline, and I’m glad I did cuz I was able to keep it together and still pull off a pretty good solo.

But the main news for this post is that I’ve started making new updates to my web site. The first thing I did was to update my origami pages to include my new models from 3013. I have nine of them, and there’s still a month and change left in the year, so there may even be one or two more. I also update the page for my book now that I have a cover image and know the real title, which BTW is now Origami Animal Sculpture and not Origami Untamed. There’s even a link to preorder it.

Beyond that the big change in the offing is to add some kind of slideshow or multi-image capability to the pages for the models. Once that’s in place it’s on to the music site, hopefully just in time to line up with a new round of songs. As I mentioned I’m getting close to finishing two more songs. I’ve also taken on doing an upgrade to the Relix site, so watch for that.

Speaking of updates, I finally got the second proof of my book this week, so there was a mad scramble to review it and get feedback to the publisher. The good news they fixed most of the layouts for the diagrams, and got rid of the GoOfY CaPiTaLiZaTiOn thing they were doing. The bad news is, for some reason they didn’t fix all the layouts, so there’s still one more round of reviews ahead.

In completely unrelated news I found out today that John F. Kennedy grew up just a few blocks from my house, up the hill on Pondfield Road.

Origami Gila Monster for AMNH Holiday Tree

Every year Origami USA puts on an origami Holiday Tree at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It’s always a great attraction full of all kinds of wonderful origami. Ros and Delrosa, who organize the tree, have asked me to contribute a model for the last several years. I look forward to this because they often ask me to come up with something new, so it’s a good design challenge and a chance to show some new work. The tree usually follows a theme that has something to do with the exhibits in the museum. This year Ros and Delrosa asked me to fold a Gila Monster, a poisonous lizard from the American Southwest. They supplied a couple of sheets of great paper for the project.

I used my Lizard a starting point for the Gila Monster model. At first I thought I might just tweak it a bit, but once I started looking at the subject I decided to make a whole new model. Although it uses a hex base similar to the Lizard, there are substantial changes. First the body proportions are altered. The Gila Monster has a longer, fatter body and a shorter, fatter tail than my generic lizard. Second, to make it more realistic, I went with five toes rather then three. As you can imagine, this resulted in a lot more folding toes. Third, I decided to go with a closed back, to show off the excellent paper Ros and Delrosa gave me. These changes added up to a major reworking of my Lizard, to the point where it’s pretty much a new model.

I folded two or three tests to work out the details in the design, particularly for the sculpting once the base is achieved. Once I was satisfied the design would work I started in on the final models. Ros and Delrosa gave me two sheets of paper. One was an 18” square with a black-and orange pattern like lava. It was not even really paper at all but some kind of plastic sheet material, maybe originally intended for wall paper. It was kind of thick and shiny. The other paper was a rectangle of pink and black in a kind of op-art pattern. This was a high-quality paper for folding but on the soft side. Both papers, different as they were, were great choices as far as capturing some aspect of the essence of the subject.

But neither was suitable for an exhibit-quality model as-is. So I took each sheet and laminated to a large sheet of foil, and then colored the reverse side black. This resulted in thick, durable and workable sheets. The black-and-orange plastic one had the look and feel of leather, and the pink-and-black paper resembled tissue foil. I cut the paper rectangle in half and was able to get two 15” squares out it. I ended up folding three models, one orange and two pink. I gave two to the museum and had one to keep.

The origami Holiday Tree is on display from sometime in late November thru the New Year. If you’re in New York during the holiday season be sure to check it out.

Third Annual OrigaMIT Convention

This weekend I attended the 3rd annual OrigaMIT convention at the venerable Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I had such a good time last year that this year Jeannie decided to come up with me. It was a great hang. I exhibited some models, taught two classes, and hung out with a lot of origami friends including Jason, Brian, Erik Gherde, Sipo, Ben, Mark, Anne, and others. My exhibit this year was smaller, with mostly new stuff: my Stellated Dodecahedron, Great Dodecahedron, and Penfractal Dodecahedron, my Penrose Tiles I-III, my Dog Timber and Cat Sophie, and to round things out my Moose, Armidillo and Cuttlefish from the book.

In the morning my class was Timber and Sophie. I was pretty impressed with the level of folders. They got thru both models in an hour. At OUSA in June they took an hour for each model. I guess maybe teaching it the second time I’m getting better at communicating the nuances effectively.

At lunchtime Jeannie and took a walk along the Charles river. There was a big rowing race going on, which was pretty cool, and towards the end a whole flurry of sailboats got out on the water.

After lunch I attended a lecture by Erik Demaine on the work of David Huffman. Huffman is more widely known for his work in computer science, having invented the encoding algorithm that’s at the heart of modern media codecs like jpg and mp3. But he was a pioneering origami guy as well, particularly with curved folding and tessellations. Erik is in the process of putting together a book about Huffman and his origami, and had slides of a lot of cool works I’d never seen before.

My second class was my Penrose Tessellations. I was expecting only a few people since the model is pretty advanced and rather esoteric, but the class was full and included a good handful of kids. Good thing I brought extra CP’s and paper. Kathy Stevick donated some pre-cut pentagon paper, which was a big time saver. Even so, teaching this class was harder than I expected. Most people aren’t used to folding in pentagonal geometry, so I had explain everything in more detail. Plus there was a lot of precreasing. The class was in fact for a system for folding tessellations of any number of cells. I had them start out making a 10-cell model out of small paper, and then start in on the 30-cell out of large paper. I figured the 10-cell would take about half the class, but it took more like 90 minutes. Still everyone hung in there and most folded a successful model. Those who were interested got enough to get going on the 30-cell one.

That evening there was a giant folding competition in the main room, and Jason asked me to participate, and Jeannie was my partner. We folded a giant version of Timber out a five- or six-foot square of white paper. I was concerned it might not stand up cuz the giant paper tends to be floppy, but somehow it worked. When it was done I called it a Dire Wolf. It was the crowd favorite, and Jeannie and I won first place. I got a copy of the proceedings of 5OSME and Jeannie got an OrigaMIT shirt.

Later that night Ben demoed his KNK Zing cutter. It’s basically the same thing a craft robo, but apparently better, cuz it can take wider stock and it has better software. It was pretty cool seeing one in action, and see how scoring the paper can save a lot of time and help with the folding. I’ve been thinking of getting one, although I delayed the purchase in favor of amps on other music gear. If I do, it’s good to know this is a good piece of gear.

As we left MIT we saw the lights of Fenway Park across the Charles. It was the last game of the pennant race. We got back to our hotel room just in time to catch the replay of a grand slam that turned the tide of the game in Boston’s favor and led the Red Sox to victory. On the drive home Sunday morning it was a perfect fall day for watching the foliage change color. The leaves were peaking red, yellow, crimson and orange. It seems like every few miles we’d round a curve and the view was just breathtaking.

Penrose Redux

I folded the first three in the series of Penrose tessellations out of good paper for my exhibit for the upcoming OrigaMIT convention October 19 in Cambridge, Mass. The 10-cell is folded from a 6” pentagonal sheet of Marble Wyndstone, the 35-cell from a 12” sheet of Tant, and the 70-cell from a 16” sheet of Wyndstone.

I’ll also be teaching the Penrose tessellations, the 10 and 35 cell versions. I’m giving them precut pentagonal paper to save time. I also finally got around to drawing out the crease patterns. Last year OrigaMIT was a great time, and I’m looking forward to it again.

I’ve also been working on a new butterfly design. More on that soon!

We’re Back Again

Rewinding a couple weeks, we spent a weekend camping in the Catskills with friends, cooking over fires, swimming in the lake, paddling around in canoes and playing acoustic guitars. After the heavy rain the first night of our trip in July we bought a new, larger shelter that sets up quicker but is bulkier and heavier to transport. Turns out the weather was beautiful and we didn’t need it. The highlight of the trip was a bald eagle circling around the lake one day. Jeannie and I managed to get close to it in the canoe. We drifted right up under the tree where he was perched and watched him spread his wings and take off across the lake. Amazing.

We were back home for a couple of days and the big news is that I got a full proof of the first draft of my book from my editor. For the most part the look is great, the choice of photos and all. One quibble is them doing goofy things with CaPiTaLiZaTioN of the chapters. The bigger issue is they condensed the diagrams to make it all fit into 128 pages. Some of the layouts are too crowded, and the drawings shrunk too much, and the layouts no longer flowing correctly. I’m working thru what to do about all that. I’ve been providing revised layouts that flow better and maximize the size of the drawings while still fitting in the available space. This is a pretty big time suck, taking me away from other projects, but I suppose it had to happen sometime. Now I’m up the most complex models in the back half of the book, and it’s clear they’ll have to come up a few pages. So either we’ll have to take some pages out elsewhere or make the book longer. We’ll see how it goes.

Then we took a long weekend road trip over Labor Day. The first stop was Washington, D.C. We visited the Udvar-Hazy annex to the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. This is out by Dulles airport and has a huge collection of huge planes and spacecraft. Among them is B-29 Enola Gay, the Space Shuttle Discovery, a Concorde, a Blackbird, a DC-10, and lots of commercial and military planes and helicopters from small to huge. Also a really cool cutaway of a nine-cylinder rotary engine that really helped me explain to the kids how motors work.

Next day the main thing was the Native American Museum and National Art Gallery in The Mall. The highlight there was a light sculpture installed in the passageway between the east and west galleries. As we moved thru it, I recognized Conway’s Life being played out on the array of LEDs. This reminded me of my friend Leo, an artist how does installations of this kind. Way back in the day I helped him program some controls so he could run Life on a grid of LEDs. Shaw’nuff when we got the end of the passageway the sign said it was Leo’s work. It’s amazing to see his stuff in the same gallery as Rembrandt as Picasso.

The last part of the trip was to the beach in Ocean City. The big downer this year is that our hotel closed its hot tub. We’ll probably have to look for a new hotel next time we go back. Other than that it was great fun and very relaxing. After the first day the weather was hot enough we didn’t even miss the hot tub. We swam in the ocean, went to the water park, went out to dinner and down to the boardwalk, and visited the ponies at Assateague.

Now we’re back home and back to work. Michelle had her first kung fu lesson yesterday. Lizzy had her first day of high school today. Michelle starts school Monday. It’ll be a whole new set of routines this fall.

Penrose Tessellation in Origami

You may recall that I started working on a new Penrose tessellation back in June at the convention. This turned out to be a really interesting challenge for a number of reasons. First, my initial attempts at a pattern for the tessellation were wrong because they didn’t go together according to the rules. There are lots of ways of joining the tiles the look correct at first but really aren’t once you start to grow the pattern. I learned alot about how to join Penrose tiles.

Second, I needed to systematically work out the widths of all the pleats. I discovered they came in at least four different widths. The ratios of the widths are all the golden mean, which I guess is not too surprising. More surprising is that the wide pleats tend to separate groups of tiles into clusters, like avenues, streets and alleys, or maybe branches on a tree. The groups are usually five tiles, sometimes ten, sometimes two or seven, and then these aggregate into larger groups.

In fact the whole pattern is fractal. I made a series of Penrose tessellations with 10, 35 and 70 tiles. For each one, you begin by precreasing the pattern of the previous tessellation and then subdivide it. This happens in an interesting way, since each tile subdivides into approximately 1.6 tiles, with the edge of parent tile forming the diagonal of a new tile.

I worked all this out when I was on vacation last month in Albany and Lake Placid. After that it took me a few weeks to actually fold the models. I’m satisfied that the approach can be taken to an arbitrarily large number of tiles. The next level out would be at least 120 tiles; the further out you go the harder it gets to find a logical stopping point. I might do that eventually, but for now I think I’m going to fold a 70’er out of good paper and declare victory. I suppose I ought to document the crease pattern too. But after that, I’ve been focused on pentagram-symmetry subjects long enough. It’s time to move onto other things.

Like compound polyhedra with a color change!