Category: Origami

I just completed a new set of models for this year’s origami tree at the American Museum of Natural History. I’ve been working in the space of arctic marine animals, and designed a Walrus and an Elephant Seal. These animals are featured in dioramas in the museum. Both are new designs and I’m pleased with how they turned out. They’re relatively easy to fold too: less than hour and maybe 20 or 30 steps. I’ve been striving lately to create less complex models that still capture some sculptural essence of the subject and think these are pretty successful in the regard. As a bonus I folded a Rocketship and a UFO. All the models were folded out of 12” (30cm) paper, the marine animals out of Canson and the space vehicles out of Tant. While a was taking photos I also included a balloon I folded recently, also of 12” tant. Next up: origami narwhal.

I finally got a chance to catch up on a few things today. I’ve been spending the evening burning backups of my recording project, listening to a bunch of CD’s a bought (Jeff Beck, The Cat Empire, and Horowitz Plays Scarlatti) and making photo galleries. I haven’t gotten back to my album cover or origami diagrams, but at least they’ve rise to the top of the list. Anyhow, as promised a while back, here are some pics from this year’s OUSA Convention.

First off, here was my exhibit.

And of course the giant folding contest.

And some highlights from other people’s exhibits.

It’s been a busy couple of weeks. First there was the origami convention and then we took a road trip upstate for the 4th to see family and friends. Now we’re back and catching up on things. We’re experiencing a major heat wave. It got up to 100 degrees today in New York City. Tomorrow’s gonna get up to a hundred and one.

It was a most excellent origami convention this year. I had six new models in my exhibit, including my Zeppelin, Turkey, Two-Color Stellated Octahedron, Great Dodecahedron, the Cairo Tessellation and its dual, which I’m calling the Cubocta Tessellation because its pattern of alternating squares and triangles reminds me of the Cuboctahedron. Classic models displayed included my Moose, Elephant, Lizard, Turtle, Rocketship and U.F.O. I’ll have pictures of mine and the other exhibits sometime soon.

I taught two classes: My U.F.O. and my Medieval Dragon. Both were well attended and went over well. The U.F.O. is a pretty advanced model and I warned them ahead of time. About a third of the class worked ahead, following my diagrams and had no problems. Most of the rest were right with me as I taught it, and there were a few who were in over their heads and couldn’t handle the precision necessary for the prefolding. The Dragon was sold out, which made it hard to teach cuz the room was big and I had to walk around a lot to show people steps close up. Again about half folded ahead and about half were with me, and I learned that a few steps in the diagrams were hard to follow. It turns out the Dragon is a great model for sculpting and I saw people do lots of cool creative interpretation with the details of the head, wings and tail.

Lizzy and Michelle were there two and folded a bunch of stuff and had a great time. They’re getting to be pretty good folders. They made friends with some other kids and stayed late Sunday for the giant folding competition. Michelle was really proud to have an Exhibitor ribbon on her badge, since she had a model in the Origami by Children exhibit.

I caught up with a bunch of my origami friends including John, Brian, Susan and Brian, and made some new friends too. John is selling iPhone and Android versions of his books now. Apparently it’s a lot of fun and at least moderately remunerative for him. He’s also coming out with four new print books this year, including new editions of the classics Dinosaur Origami and Origami Sea Life with Robert Lang, with updated diagrams and a bunch of new models. While he was in NYC John met with his publisher and they gave him back a box of models that they’d used for photos of the book cover. Some of them were Robert’s sea creatures, so John kept surreptitiously putting one or two of them on Robert’s exhibit over the course of the weekend.

Susan Thomas in addition to origami does this thing with making jewelry out of rings of chain mail and rubber o-rings. It’s a pretty cool idea and she has a book out on it, and it seems to be catching on. Jeannie made a bracelet, and Susan gave a bracelet to Lizzy and Michelle, and they’ve all been getting lots of compliments on them. I think it’d be pretty wild to make a sweater or something using that technique.

I met Roman Diaz from Uruguay, who is a very nice guy and brilliant origami artist. I want to get his new book, Origami Essence, but they were sold out of it at the convention. I gave him one of my models, a half Stellated Dodecahedron. I met Alexis from Quebec who is an excellent folder too. I met Alexis because he took my U.F.O class and suggested an improvement to a sequence of folds. We got to talking, and I invited him to be my partner for the giant folding competition.

The giant folding was a new thing last year and it turned out to be really popular, so this year there were a lot more participants. I folded my Lizard out of a nine foot square. I figured it was a good model because the paper is so big and heavy a lot of models turn out floppy, but the Lizard lies on it’s belly and has enough layers that it’d keep its shape. I taught Alexis the model the day before and he seemed to have basically memorized it, so we had no problem folding it in the allotted hour. And it turned out looking really cool, like an ice blue Komodo Dragon. And we even won the prize for coolest model. A lot of other teams made really nice models too. Some standouts were Roman’s frog and Aviv’s Kawasaki Rose. Lizzy folded a snake. We’re gonna burn ours when we go camping later this month.

The most interesting class I took on Monday was by Nathan Zeichner, who is a CS student developing his own origami software. It has an interesting spin in that it’s part of a project to create self-folding origami robots, if you can believe that. I talked to him a length after his lecture. He said he was inspired by my paper in 3OSME.

Since lots of people were asking about it, I have to say I feel good about how my book is shaping up. I have over 100 pages diagrammed now. I’ve organized into chapters and have a few more models to design and diagram to round things out. I’ve decided to jettison my polyhedra for a future book since I have enough material already and they will be really hard to diagram. So that suddenly puts me alot closer to completion. It also puts the center of gravity in the intermediate to complex range rather then the supercomplex, which I think will have a broader appeal.

Next up: road trippin’. Coming soon OUSA Convention pictures.

It’s been a long time since I bogged about my ongoing origami book. Well I recently finished diagramming two more models. One is my Medieval Dragon, clocking an just about 100 steps. That’s twelve pages as I currently have it laid out. The other is my U.F.O., which is ten pages and a shade above 60 steps, but from step 40 or so onward it’s all fully three dimensional, so each step is a major work of drawing. These are by far two most involved models I’ve done so far. The only thing that comes close is my Adirondack Moose, which is also about 60 steps, but it’s only 3-d for the last few steps. Both the Moose and the Dragon are fairly traditional designs, using variations on classic bases and inspired by models in John Montroll’s first book. The U.F.O. however is completely modern and without an antecedent, and well over half the folding sequence is precreasing. So while it may not seem like a lot in terms of number of models, it’s a lot in terms of page count, and I knocked of two major models to boot. This brings me up to 16 models done, about 90 pages worth. I’m definitely more than halfway done with the book, so I think its time to start looking at the publishing process.

I signed up to teach both of these at the upcoming OUSA convention – only a week away. So I’m glad I got the diagrams finished but as usual I have lots of ideas for things I’d like to fold but haven’t had the time to fully develop. So I think this weekend will be a big folding jam.

I’m posting pics of the final step of each model as a way to motivate myself to continue by showing the result without giving away the whole diagram. I may go back and post pictures of the final steps of my other completed diagrams to create a sort of evolving table of contents. I need to update my origami site anyway. I have a number of models, going back more than a year, that I need to photograph and post. Well July will be a good time for that. I always get a big boots of energy and creativity from the convention, and that will fuel me into the summer to continue developing things.

My first origami tessellations was a grid of pentagons. Now I’ve made a tessellation of triangles and squares to go with it. And mean that in a very specific way. This mesh is the dual of the other. If you draw a dot in the center of each cell of the pentagon grid and connect them all, you’d get this pattern. Five cells converge at each vertex. In the other pattern all the cells were the same shape, but either three or four cells converged at a vertex. I’ve never seen anyone fold this pattern before and the two of them make a nice set.