Category: Origami

Montroll Polyhedra

When I first started designing my own origami models one of my areas of focus was creating polyhedra from a single square. At the time most polyhedral origami was modular, made from lots of little bits of paper folded (usually) into triangles with tabs that fit together. This was not so interesting to me as the single-sheet approach, which no one else was really doing.

When I met John Montroll it turned out he was doing it too, and in fact had just published a book of single-sheet origami polyhedra, the first of it’s kind. I’ve learned a lot from hanging out with John and my polyhedra concepts have advanced considerably. Now John is close to completing his third book on polyhedra, which take things to a whole nuther level. He recently asked me to fold a few of his designs to be used for photos in the book. Here are some pictures I took before I sent them off.

They are made of 12’” squares of Canson paper, which is a thickish art paper that has a really nice color and texture. I’ve been getting more an more into folding with thicker papers these days. For years the prevailing trend in origami has been to thinner and thinner papers for subjects like insects and stuff. But I like thicker papers because the model comes out stronger, more sculptable and more durable, especially if you work with larger sizes. This has also had an impact on my design sensibilities, as I tend to avoid designs that absolutely requite thin paper, such as using lots and lots of internal layers. This also leads to larger, more optimized designs. Of course thick is relative. A lot of these papers are barely thicker than standard office paper, but working on fine details it can feel as thick as cardboard.

John is always very elegant with his paper usage and most of polyhedra are just one layer thick on the facets. So although these are complex models, they came out really well, and very strong. You could probably play hackey-sack with some of them!

 

Winter Break

Well the holidays have come and gone and the tree is sitting by the curb, and it’s back to the ol’ grind in the new year.  Getting up before dark and standing out in the cold waiting for the train is what I love best about January.  But I don’t want to sound to grumpy.  I had a really nice winter break.  Got to see some friends and family and do a bunch of travelling and other things, and just as importantly, take some much needed time to rest.  Of course the vacation was too short and there were people I wanted to see but didn’t get the chance to.  Sorry John, John and Larry.

Here are a few assorted highlights:

Way back over two weeks ago, the Friday before Christmas was supposed to be the night of the kids’ big xmas concert at school, but nature had other plans.  A big snowstorm meant school was cancelled so the concert was postponed until the following day prompting all kinds of frenzied reordering of plans.  In the end the concert was a success.   Lizzy had a Flute solo (the only solo in the band) and did very well.

It was a big xmas for legos.  The kids had a lego advent calendar and they both some lego sets as presents, Jeannie set up her lego train from a few years ago around the tree, carrying presents and all.  To I got a lego Avatar Air Temple set as a gift from the office.  So we put ’em all together under the tree in a big ol’ explosion-at-the-genre-factory kind of legopalooza extravaganza.

We played a good amount of Nintendo after playing virtually none at all since last winter break.  Up to 59 stars in Super Mario Galaxy, plus played a bunch of other games at various people’s houses.

I had some good Origami time.  I finally got a chance to get back to working on my book.  I finished diagramming and laying out my Elephant II, which weighs in at 33 steps, well down from my previous pachyderm with its 57 steps.  Also closed in on my Moose, which will be about 70 steps — just the antlers to go — and am more than halfway done with my Adirondack chair.  So I now have models diagrammed, and 2 more in striking distance.  Not too far off the pace of one a month, which isn’t bad considering I did no origami at all the last month or so.  Winter has always been my big origami time, being dark and cold outside and all, so I’m optimistic that I can continue in this groove.  (Last year was a bit of an anomaly, as it was right a year ago I started a three-month marathon of working 7 day, 60+ hour weeks.  Luckily I don’t have that sort of thing on the horizon now.) 

Also my friend John Montroll asked me to fold some of his polyhedra for the cover photo of his forth coming book.  I recently bought some Canson, which as an art paper normally used for pastels, thicker than regular kami. I thought it’d be perfect for these models. So far I’ve made 4 out of 5 of them in 12″ squares, and they’ve come out quite well.  Nice look, good and very strong.

I also spent some more time on the continuing saga of fixing and upgrading my computer and music recording system.  I will talk about that in a separate post, since I’m sure you’ll want all the tedious geeky details.

Lastly we took the girls for a day trip skiing.  After staying up and sleeping late every day for more than a week, it was hard going getting up and out the door, and the mountain was the most packed I’ve ever seen it, but the snow was good and we all had a good time.  Lizzy is doing quite well.  She picked up right were she left off last year and got here groove after a run or two, and even went down a blue trail in the afternoon.  Michelle is not a big or strong, and needed some coaxing.  I spent a good deal of time with Michelle on the bunny hill, getting her used to basic sliding, turning, stopping, shifting and holding weight and skis.  I think she progressed pretty well.  I’m hoping she’ll be ready to get on a lift by the end of the season.

Origami Blast From the Past

This was from a couple of weeks ago, but I was just writing it when my computer turned bad. So here you go.

Many years ago (1994 I think), before I joined the Origami Society I attended one of their annual conventions. It was just for the day and mostly just saw the exhibition and hung around the common area. I hadn’t really done much origami in a number of years but I remembered that OUSA was based in NYC, and had always been curious about it. It turned out to be a really cool experience and I was amazed at how origami far origami design had progressed since the 80’s. In fact it was in the midst of a revolution that is still playing out today. One model I remember well for it’s artistic impact was a fossil, a lizard skeleton rendered as a precise but random-looking set of wrinkles and creases in a torn up old paper bag.

I decided to contribute a model to the annual collection. It was my dragon, one of my first successful origami designs among only a handful of models at the time. It used a modified blintzed frog base, a variation on the base John Montroll used for his Pegasus in Origami for the Enthusiast. I diagrammed it using pen and ink and drawing board over the course of a few months and submitted it to OUSA. It was a tumultuous year for them as the founders (Lillian Oppenheimer and Alice Gray) had recently died and there was a turnover in the leadership. In any event I never heard back from them.

Years later I found out it had been accepted and published in the 1995 Origami USA annual collection. I had tried to locate a copy for ages, but it was the one year of all the back issues that was sold out. Finally a couple of weeks ago, my friend Marc Kirshenbaum (who is on the OUSA publication committee) located an old copy and offered to me. Shortly after Thanksgiving I went over to his place to pick it up. Like I said Origami was undergoing a major design revolution, so it’s really interesting to see the combination of old and new styles in a collection from that time. It’s also really gratifying to see my early work along side established origami masters. So a great big thanks to Marc!

Marc also deserves credit and thanks for encouraging me to get serious and systematic about designing my own origami models. The year after I joined OUSA (2003 I think), I took a Monday class that he was teaching about design, and was inspired to invent a lizard. I realized then I had all the knowledge I needed, and I just had to go do it! It sparked the beginning of a creative streak which I am still mining for new ideas.

Origami Site Update

I just completed a major revision to my Origami web site at www.zingorigami.com (also www.zingman.com/origami). Attentive readers of this blog will recall that I started on this endeavor way back in September. I had to get around to a bunch of other projects first, but I’m happy to have completed phase one of the operation.

I invented about ten new origami models this year, so the update was long overdue. Major features include reorganizing the collection of models into a series of pages according to a set of major categories. The index page now links into these pages and presents a comprehensive index of thumbnails. I also created a page of Adirondack Origami, to highlight the feature I did for Adirondack Life magazine earlier this year. Additionally I created a page for info about Origami commissions if you’re interested in having you own origami handmade by me the artist, and a page about my forthcoming book, mostly a placeholder for now.

The next step will be a new round of photographs. For many of the recent models I simply put up snapshots, but sometime over the winter I plan on folding exhibit level versions of all my models and doing a proper photo shoot of them. This will also be useful for the book.

Then phase three will be to make the pages served dynamically. I need to research some kind of lightweight CMS and template engine, or maybe make my own. That will be a pretty good project.

And in related news, my friend John has a new web site to showcase his origami: www.johnmontroll.com

Turtle In a Tree

I recently folded one of my Snapping Turtles for the Origami USA annual Holiday Tree at the American Museum of Natural History. Every year the origami society does a holiday tree decorated with origami. This year the theme is Origami Around the Museum, which opens up a wide range of subjects. I dropped the model off there today at lunchtime. It’s exciting to see the tree coming together, and it’s also really nice to take a walk thru Central Park on a crisp fall day.

I’m also really happy with the way the Turtle came out. I folded it out of a sheet of golden-yellow Tant paper that I bought from Nicholas Terry’s Origami Shop last fall. I can’t say enough about how great this paper is for complex models. It comes in nice big sheets (35cm square) and is a good deal thicker and stronger than kami but much thinner and more workable than Wyndstone or Canson. For the style of model I design it’s great; foil or wet-folding are completely unnecessary. I also came up with a subtle but important improvement in folding the shell. At the end where the shell becomes 3-D, instead of doing simple crimps around the edge, I do a fold — I don’t know if there’s a name for it but I’m going to call it a sink-crimp and if you’re an origami person you’ll understand. It works great and locks the shell together really strongly.

This is as good a time as any to update you on the progress of my book. I’m in the middle of three diagrams now, for my Moose, for my Adirondack Chair and for my Elephant Mark II. Actually the first two of these are nearly done, up to the point where the model becomes 3-D. The Moose turned out to be pretty long and complicated at over 60 steps! Perhaps unsurprisingly, the steps get hard to draw as the model progresses, especially at the end. Alot of the time I work on the book late a night, and often I’m tired, so I’ll do something less hard but still productive like the beginning or middle of another model.

I feel like I’m falling a bit behind the pace I’m setting for myself, although it’s still pretty good, given how busy we’ve been this fall. I had hoped to have 8 to 10 models diagrammed by the end of the year; and I’m on track for 6 by the end of November, and 2 to 4 in a month is unlikely. I guess when this set of three is done I can go back and update some models already diagrammed into the new format for the book and that will speed things up compared to doing tons of new drawings.

Scouting Outing

Last weekend the girls and Jeannie went to a region Girl Scouts event and had blast meeting other kids and doing crafts and other activities. Tonight guest bloggers Lizzy and Michelle tell the story.

Hello I’m ….. Elizabeth or you can call me Lizzy. Liz works too. I also like eLizzy.

Hello this is Michelle. You can also call me Shelly.

This is hamster trio. You can call us cute. Or cuties.

Umm, this is Elizabeth talking. Laugh laugh laugh. Oh yeah. Let me tell you about the best time of my life. It’s called ….. Girl Scouts Heart of the Hudson. Explosion baby! Pow zip bang bing burp! There were lots of kids there. We taught origami boxes and cootie catchers. My mom made about 600 papers and we used about 400 of them. We learned how to do a new lanyard. My best friend Isabella was there but I didn’t see because it was so big. It was fun. Goodbye!

Weekend in D.C.

Over the weekend we went to Washington to visit my friend John, who is an accomplished origami artist. It was a really fun trip.

But first the part about danger and adventure. About a month ago, after all our summer travels were over, I took my car into the shop for an oil change, tire rotation and new front brakes. Since that time, I’ve only driven to the train station and back, and have not taken the car about 30 mph (48 km/h). The kids had a half day of school on Friday, so we lit out for DC about 2 in the afternoon. The trip was great, the traffic smooth and light, and the weather turned from cool and cloudy to mild and sunny. But I after I got on the highway I started to notice a vibration in the front end, and as the trip went on it got worse. By the time we got off the Beltway it was pretty bad, and soon the front brakes were smoking! Luckily we made it to John’s house and there was a garage just a couple blocks away.

It turned out one of the tires was seriously worn along the outside edge, to the point where it was ready to blow out! I think the garage last month must have screwed up with the tire rotation, cuz this was not normal wear. On top of that the rear brakes were shot. So I got new back breaks and ended up getting four new tires, cuz one other tire was pretty badly worn and all of them were more than five years old in any event. Ah well, it was an expensive hassle, but I would have had to get this work done at some point, and all in all we were pretty lucky.

And it didn’t even slow us down very much. There are a lot of good restaurants in John’s neighborhood and Friday night we got Mongolian food. Saturday I got up early to deal with the car, and then we all took the train into downtown D.C. We went down the Mall to the Washington Monument, the Reflecting Pool and the Lincoln Memorial. I haven’t been there since high school, so it was interesting to see how the place had changed. For on thing they put up a slightly incongruous World War Two memorial right near the Washington Monument.

It’s also interesting how some thing haven’t changed. It’s a long walk (4 miles from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial and back), and you’d think they’d have trams or bicycles or something for the tourists in this day and age of fat America. It would also come in handy for people with kids or a bad ankle, or people who don’t want to walk the whole length of the Mall twice. Also the food selection is pretty meager, just a single concession stand with bad pizza and hot dogs and soda. You’d think there’d be row of places to get lunch.

The highlight of the day was the Smithsonian Air and Space museum. This is a fantastic place and I’ve been to it every time I’ve been to Washington. It’s full of spaceships, including such legendary craft as the Apollo 11 Command Module, and of a more recent vintage Spaceship One, and storied airplanes including the original 1903 Wright Flyer plus hundreds of later models from every era of experimental, military and commercial aviation. There used to be a Space Shuttle but that’s now gone. I understand they moved it to a new museum hall out near the airport.

The kids really loved it (as Jeannie I both did at that age), and I don’t think they ever really thought to spaceships as something real before, only an idea out of movies. I grew up in the 70’s and I remember the waning days of the Apollo program, Skylab, Viking and Voyager, and the development and debut of the Space Shuttle. All that stuff was really cutting edge back then; now it seems almost nostalgic. I mean, my 41-year old classic muscle car is built of the same technology that took humanity to the moon! I read in the paper today that the US will not have manned space light capability for the next five years and will have to pay Russia to send up our astronauts like dotcom zillionares do. Sigh, yet another failure of our government.

In any event the museum was a blast and it was a great day. When we got back to John’s neighborhood the garage was still open and I picked up the car. We get Peruvian food for dinner and played Settlers of Catan after. (It seems John always wins.)

John has a grand piano. It’s been a few years since I’ve played a grand. I used to play one a lot when I lived in California and hung out at my friend David’s house. My own piano is an upright, and it’s good for what it is, but a grand has a faster, better action and much more definition in the sound, especially in the bass registers and the very high end. So it was very enjoyable to play on that.

And of course we spent a lot of time talking origami. I folded some models out of his forthcoming book, a magnum opus of polyhedra and geometric origami. He has a chapter on polygons, including a regular pentagon and a golden rectangle. His pentagon is (folded from a square) is a very accurate approximation, but the golden rectangle is mathematically exact, which is very interesting because it’s only a few steps; the golden rectangle is latent in the square. I have been searching for year for a method to fold a regular pentagon (or a 36 degree angle), and his is the best I’ve seen. But it doesn’t beat the method I’ve come to prefer, which is basically to eyeball it, because I’ve gotten good at it with practice. In any event, since the golden ratio is expressed everywhere in pentagonal symmetry, I feel intuitively that there must be a way to develop a mathematically perfect pentagon from a golden rectangle. I plan on investigating this.

We spent some time considering the Archimedean Solids and their duals. I developed and folded a Truncated Octahedron from a square sheet of paper. This a really interesting shape, composed of eight hexagons and six squares and has the property of being able to tile space. To my surprise and delight, my design mainly worked, right up until I got closing the model and locking the last face in place with it’s neighbors. This ending stuff can be tricky but is essential to a nice model. My current design wants to spring apart, but it looks like I can get make it with stiffer paper and a slight adjustment of the layout of the faces on the paper.

Back in the office today I got a demo to Flash 10 from an Adobe evangelist. It has a lot of cool new API for doing 3D. My friend Veronique turned to me and said this would be cool for my origami software. She’s totally right, but this had the effect of making me sad because I’d love to have the time to work on that project again. I started it back in the dotcom bust when I was out of work and got a lot of design work done and start on a demo, but it would take months of full time work to get to the next level with it. Ah well, with the economy going the way it is maybe I’ll get my chance. Heh!

Still In the Middle of Things

Let’s see… Sorry if this post is a boring one, all work and no play. But you can skip it if you want.

Michelle’s room is basically done. Very nice pale yellow. It’s been really humid all weekend so we’re giving the paint a while to dry before we put everything back.

Made progress on my new origami page. Will have something to show soon.

Made progress on my Moose diagrams. Almost there.

Made progress on my new song, Who Can Fool Me. Rewrote the lyric last week and re-tracked the vocals last night. I had some weird noise in my system that made it impossible to record cleanly. Rebooted my system and it went away. I filled out the arrangement some. I added some mellotron-style synth strings. Still to tweak the arrangement a bit, but it’s getting there. I experimented with a double-time arpeggio voice in the second half of the song to keep the energy level rising throughout. Has potential, but isn’t there yet. Also still have to add some horns and the solo synth, which will sound something like a wah-wah guitar or gutbucket trumpet.

Did not get a chance to finish the Rollercoaster of Cheese Flash animation with the girls.

But Lizzy is becoming a stronger chess player all the time. I’m playing against her with all my pawns, king, queen, a knight, a bishop and sometimes a rook.