Category: Origami

Another Origami USA annual convention has come on gone. This year was an especially productive weekend and fun time for me. I meant to write a post last week when I was preparing for the convention, but I was too busy and ran out of time. So I’ll rewind a bit.

I’ve been busy folding new models and diagramming the past few weeks. A week ago Friday I had planned to take the day off from work and finish folding a whole bunch of works-in-progress. But I had to go in to the office to manage a group of contractors who are taking over the codebase of a project from another group, a project which I will be overseeing going forward. And as it turns out the codebase is sort of a fixer-upper. So it goes.

I had some good origami time on Sunday, but I had to choose between finishing models and finishing diagrams. I already had completed several new models for my exhibit this year and went back and wet-folded a few others, so I decided to concentrate on the diagrams. (More on the uncompleted models soon, as the they will be completed.) I went thru all the diagrams I had made in the last year -– fourteen in all — and proofread them. A few were mistake-free, several had one or two minor mistakes, several more had a sequence of steps that needed to be redrawn for clarity and/or accuracy. And then the last few — the Moose, Adirondack Chair, and U.F.O. needed to be finished. The ending steps of each of these models are fully three-dimensional so every step requires a new, highly detailed drawing. So that took up all of my free time and late into the night the rest of the week.

Last Thursday there was a happy hour event after work for the people in my group. I was vacillating on whether to go, being tempted to skip it to go home and fold. But there has been alot of turmoil lately in my group, and people will speak the kind of truth after work with a beer in their hand that the won’t in the office in the daytime, so I went along to hang out and encourage my colleagues to have another drink and see if there was anything to learn. The place was way downtown in SoHo, a neighborhood that I haven’t been to in years.

The bar was right across the street from where I used to live way back in 1993-94 with my friend Levitt when the area was pretty sketchy. I was in a third story walk-up loft that have a living space in one half and a studio full of stage lighting equipment in the other, and we were (among other things) working on software to automate the control of the lights thru MIDI. The stairway always smelled like machine oil and your were always light headed when you reached the flat. We suspected poor ventilation and carbon monoxide. The neighborhood changed a lot in the time I was there. There used to be some crack bum sleeping up the block, in a doorway that became an Armani store. Guess he had to find another place. Sometimes there were movie shoots on the streets and was able to grab breakfast on my way to work from a catering cart.  Now the building that where my loft was is no longer there, but a new high-rent luxury apartment is standing in its place.

When I got home that night I was too tired mentally to do any folding, so I went to bed early, which turned out the be a good move. I was able to get all my weekend chores done by midday Friday and had some time to finish preparing my exhibit and tweak some of the models I had. Each year my exhibit gets better and this was the best one yet.

More on the conference itself in part 2…

And so castles made of sand fall to the sea eventually.

Forget what I said about the nice weather. We had a beautiful weekend but it’s been raining for four days straight now. Also it turns out that that plant in our yard is a mountain laurel, not a rhododendron. Ah well. To top it off there’s been more turmoil at the office the last few weeks, culminating in my boss, a VP of technology, resigning yesterday. And so it goes.

…

After I designed my origami tower I realized I could combine several towers on one sheet to form a castle. And so I’ve been experimenting in that direction. I came up with a bunch of prototypes with several successful layouts. The first was what I’m now calling the Grand Castle. The idea was to have one large central tower surrounded by a wall with four smaller towers at the corners. Once I started folding it I realized that I would also have a tower in the center of each edge wall, resulting in a total of nine towers. These middle towers would be rectangular rather than square and I would have to work out how to finish them. So I made a second version, called the Armory. It’s a single block of a building with four towers in a square with no central tower. This one seemed promising so I tried a few layouts with different proportions. The third one is called the Classic Castle. It consists of six towers in two groups. In the front is a gatehouse flanked by two small towers. In the back is a keep consisting of a large tower with a hall on each side. In between is a central courtyard.

This seems like maybe the best layout, but a lot of work to fold. So I went with the Armory to do as an exhibit-level model because it’s alot less complicated. Also I found it’s symmetry appealing, and thought it’d easier to finish neatly. Once I began I realized the base itself would make a really nice tessellation.

Now I’m thinking I can combine the castle technology with some ideas from the Origami from Space series to create all kinds of domes and spires, and virtually any kind of architectural structure. I have my plate full for this year, but look for more of this stuffs for the 2010 exhibition.

I’m sure you if you read this blog regularly you’ve been wondering how is that origami War Elephant coming along? Well, I’m pleased to announce here it is!

When I started designing this, Jeannie commented that I was aspiring to Brian Chan (http://chosetec.darkclan.net/origami/) territory. Making models at that level of complexity requires some R&D. I folded quite a number of prototypes, mostly out of larger (15″) foil paper, to work thru the placement and proportion of the tower with respect to the elephant body. The other major issue to solve was what to do with all the pleats that ended up at the edges of the sheet. Some of them were tucked inside, but I was to use the ones near the back to make more complete hind feet. The ones in the front were transformed in into multiple tusks in the spirit of Peter Jackson’s Oliphaunt.

Which is cool because I originally got the idea to design this model after seeing Lord of the Rings, thinking a fantastic Elephant would make a nice complement to my Dragon. The concept and design changed as it developed, but it’s nice that I was able to keep that original detail, and that the insight about the relationship between the castle and the tusks turned out to be correct.

The last issue had to do with thickness of the paper.  It’s easy to make pretty much anything out of foil, which is why it’s good for prototyping, cuz you can just crush it into shape. But for exhibit quality models, I tend to use thicker papers like Wyndstone and Canson, and the layers can add up fast and produce a tendency for the model to spring open. In the past I’ve tended to solve this problem by refining my designs to use the paper tension as a feature just where I want it in the model. But for this subject it just couldn’t be simplified out.

So I ended up wet-folding the model. This has been a technique that has been around for years and alot of complex folders use it. But I’ve resisted up until now, feeling that it’s a bit of a cheat. But it works so fantastically, now I’m a believer! You just dampen the parts of the model that you would crush it were foil, and clamp it in place with a paperclip and wait for it to dry. Then the paper is held in place stiffly in the desired position.

In fact I like it so much I went back and touched up some of my older models with this technique!

The model shown here is folded from a 19″ square of Wyndstone Elephant Hide paper.  Coming soon: new origami galleries!

I’ve had the idea for some time to make an origami War Elephant, basically an elephant with a castle on its back, and maybe some bigger tougher tusks and other scary-looking armaments.  The main design challenge is how to integrate the castle with the rest of model and still make it out of a single uncut square.  The two main options are it would come out of one corner – probably the where the tail would be, or to make it come out of the middle.  I’ve been investigating the  middle way.

There is a good base for this as it turns out. I don’t know the name of it, but it’s a simple, elegant classic tessellation. Jeanie folded one a few years back and it’s been decorating our sideboard ever since.  The tower I had in mind had crenulated battlements ringing the top, and something resembling arches on the sides.  I had tried a few other approaches to the tower but none of them was very good.  This time I started with just the simple base, and it worked out really well.  In this simple tower all the edges of the paper are along the bottom edge, so it should be fairly straightforward to embed it in a larger square.

In fact the cool thing about using a tessellation as a base is that it basically gives you a small square in the middle of your main square.  The number, size and position of the small square can be manipulated, so it is very flexible.  It also gives these gussets that run along the major axes, effectively giving you four extra points.  I might be able to use this make a LotR-style Oliphaunt with four tusks!  It also means I can make a bunch of towers together on the same sheet and link them with walls, forming a Castle.  I’m thinking of one larger central tower surrounded by four smaller ones.

I hope to finish these experiments this spring.  BTW, my book is coming along.  I have twelve models diagrammed now, and hope to get to sixteen by the convention in June.

It’s that time again. For the third year in a row the kids folded models to submit to Origami USA’s Origami By Children exhibition. This year Lizzy took an interest in modular boxes. This is outside my sphere of interest, so Jeannie went ahead and showed her some basic modules and how to put them together. Lizzy also folded a cute panda but preferred the box and made a few of them. Meanwhile Michelle had no problem with the units but couldn’t get the assembly part of it together. So she folded a few things, and finally settled on a traditional Candy Dish nicely folded from some printed Washi paper. With her the main thing is always encouraging her to be slow and careful and make sharp creases, especially with the first few steps of the model. She also folded a Star from John Montroll’s Teach Yourself Origami. This is a pretty advanced model which uses sinks, petal folds and rabbit ears. We decided not to submit it to OFC, however, cuz I helped her a bit with neatening up and completing the sink. Interestingly, the kids are not really into folding representational subjects like animals, but mostly prefer thinks like boxes and vases.

Last weekend I taught an origami special folding session at the Natural History Museum. I taught my Elephant and Moose. The class did really well considering it was two complex models and we went pretty fast. One of my students was a seven-year-old kid who did fantastic. I taught the Elephant first. It has only about half the number of steps of the Moose, but it’s a far more subtle and complex model because there’s no base per se, but there’s lots of compound folds and 3-D sculpting. The Moose is based on an older design style (uses a variation of the stretched bird base) and has mostly simpler folds, but lots more of them. This is proving to be a very popular model, maybe because there aren’t alot of origami mooses out there and almost no-one (myself included) has the patience to fold Robert Lang’s.

I’ve diagrammed both of these models for my book and it’s interesting to see how much communication is really necessary to get a model across and how much of that can be captured in diagrams. The really skilled folders have no problem with anything, and are helpful in pointing out mistakes in my diagrams. But I feel that making the models and diagrams good enough to reach out to intermediate folders so they can tackle something above their level and succeed is an important goal, not just for the sake of reaching a broader audience but for origami in general as an art form. I never had any origami people in my life when I was growing up, and learned solely from books, mainly John Montroll’s.

Speaking of which, John came up for a visit over the weekend, which is always a fun time. He’s got loads of new polyhedra models that he’s arranging into a sequel to his forthcoming Polyhedra book with A. K. Peters. He also has a brand new book out with Dover called Storytime Origami which includes among other things a very cool wolf.

The girls came to the museum with me. We had enough time to take a quick tour of the outer space hall and the dinosaurs. Lizzy really like the dinosaurs but Michelle thought they were a bit creepy (she never has before). I told her not to worry because it’s very rare that the dinosaur ghosts find their bones and reanimate as undead dino-skeletons. This didn’t seem to reassure her. When we got home that evening we watched the Space Shuttle launch, which tied in nicely to the theme of the day. The kids had never seen a shuttle launch, and apart from the sheer spectacle of it, they were pretty blown away that after just a few minutes the shuttle was 50 miles high and hundreds of miles away, and going at the thousands of miles per hour and just getting faster.

I recently completed a commission for some origami elephants for a client in Germany.  They asked for a series of models in various stages of completion and asked that I use white textured paper.  I used 12′ Canson paper and they came out quite nice.  Should be interesting to how they photograph them.  Meanwhile here are my own snapshots, taken prior to boxing ’em up.

And in case you were wondering, there’s an historical connection between Germans and White Elephants.  The Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne had an albino war elephant a named Abul-Abbas.  It was a gift from the Caliph of Baghdad. King Charlemagne rode the beast in battle against the Danes.  Badass!

I came up with a new origami model, which I’m calling the Love Bug.  It’s a whimsical insect, a variations on my butterfly where the wings form the shape of a heart.   It was inspired in part by playing cards with Lizzy the other night.  The deck was the kind where every card has a picture, and the ace of hearts had a similar sort of moth or something.  The other inspiration was my ongoing quest to make a satisfying origami ladybug.  I had once made an attempt based on my butterfly and figured out a way to do the color change for the wings and again for the spots.  Unfortunately the basic body plan was too different for it to work, and the legs ended up in the wrong place and the wings were the wrong shape.  But I found I was able to use that approach for this one, and here you go!