Zing Blog 2

A fitting topic for the first day of spring. I had thought I might blog about something else tonight, since origami keeps coming up, and I have been doing other things too, honest. I could say plenty about my new job, but I think I’ll wait until a project goes live. Or I could talk about how I almost made it thru the winter without catching cold this year — until last weekend!

I could talk about my ongoing music work, and how painstaking it is to sequence good drum parts for a jammin’ sounding track. I’ve worked with some really good drummers over the years (you know who you are, Mark, Larry, and Pat), and boy do I miss them. On the other hand, I’m not really set up to mic a drum kit in my little project studio, so it might not come out any good anyway.

I could talk about how I am looking into changing my workout routine, mainly by moving it downstairs. The major reason I’ve been working out upstairs all this time is that I have high ceilings in my living room, and do some exercises where I lift weights over my head. I could do it downstairs, but I’d need to do those sets sitting, which means I need to get a bench. Which has led me to rediscover why I hate shopping along with the fact that modern workout equipment is super-expensive and way more complicated than I need. Like hundreds of dollars just for a bench! When I was in high school I had a bench that came with an exercise machine and I bought the whole system for something like $100. It was really simple, just a board covered with vinyl and foam and some legs. Good for dumbbells and situps. Probably worth $20. I gave it to my brother. I wonder if he still has it…

But I’m not going to blog about any of that stuff tonight. Nope, for now the main topic is origami butterflies. I normally don’t do insects, because that branch of origami has evolved into something like speed metal in music, very focused on one particular dimension — developing lots of points. Not to say it isn’t amazing, cuz it is; but it’s not really my thing. But a butterfly seemed like a good subject because it’s more lyrical than your average bug, and I had an idea for an approach. I’ve seen a bunch of really beautiful butterfly designs, notably Michael LaFosse’s, that are great wings but don’t have legs. I’ve seen others that have legs but are a bit to technical, given the subject. Granted some of these models are from the era where any insect at all was pioneering, but hey. So I wanted to something simple and sculptural, but still complex enough to have legs.

I actually came up with the design midway thru last year’s OUSA convention. Every year I seem to come up with one or two new designs, usually manifesting something I’ve been thinking of for a while but hadn’t had the chance to fold yet. I showed it to a bunch of people and the response was great. It’s based on a waterbomb base, with two of the flaps forming the wings and the other two forming the legs. It’s easily doable from a 6″ square, and only the only hard part is 2 closed sinks in a row. The thing I like best about it is it pretty successfully captures the moment of spreading its wings and taking flight.

I’ve been refining the model over time, an last fall I went to the butterfly tent in the American Museum of Natural History. John Montroll had told me that butterflies really only have 4 legs, the front ones are vestigial and you can’t really see them. Shaw ’nuff he was right. Looking at dozens of butterflies, they all looked like they have four legs. So a redesign is in the offing. Ah well.

Still, I’m happy enough with this design that I’m working on full diagrams for it. Every year I try to diagram one model to donate to the OUSA annual collection. I’m not quite done, but I’ll be sure to post it when I’m done. For now, enjoy this pics and the Crease Pattern for the base.

Yesterday I taught at a Special Folding Session with the Origami Society at the American Museum of Natural History. I taught my Turtle, and diagrammed the crease pattern just for the occasion. It’s a model I like alot, and it makes good use of my Hexagon Base. I’ve gotten a fair amount of request for diagrams over time, and one of the organizers of the session asked for this model. One reason I never diagrammed or taught it is that shortly after I finished it, Robert Lang’s Origami Design Secrets came out, and his Western Pond Turtle is not unlike mine in appearance. My model, however, uses a very different folding sequence that is both much easier and roughly twice as efficient in its use of paper. Like many of my models from my Elephant to my UFO, it follows a sort of “upside-down-bowl-with legs” approach, with the greater part of model being only a single layer of paper thick, and the bulk of the paper going to form the legs, head and tail, with the rest gathered near the edges and providing strength.

The Museum is such a great, fun place, and it’s a happy circumstance of history that OUSA is based there. My class was pretty small, 8 people, but 3 or 4 were teenage boys and one in particular was really annoying in a mostly funny kind of way. They’re origami geeks, all into debating which model out there is the “hardest”, and asserting “Satoshi rules!” and that sort of thing, plus a lot of, uh, less mature banter. I didn’t know any origami people when I was growing up, but if I did, I’d have probably been like that.

The model went over well, but all those toes took a long time to fold, so I didn’t get to spend as much time as I’d have liked on the sculpting at the end. It’s pretty advanced model, so not everyone could pull it off with enough precision, but most did pretty well. A fair amount of sculpting can’t really be diagrammed anyway, it’s up to the expressiveness of the artist. It was a fun time, and I think I’ll teach one of these sessions again.

Jeannie and the girls came, and Lizzy stayed and folded while I taught, to the delight of the ladies who like to make ornaments and boxes — she made a bunch of that kind of stuff. Jeannie and Michelle took in the museum, and at the end we had a whirlwind tour of the dinosaur lobby and main African hall. Didn’t make it to the whale room, but otherwise a great day.

And, as a bonus, as I was putting together the CP, I came up with an armadillo, using my hexagon base. I had been thinking of a way to fold an armadillo since last summerwhen we were in Florida and they were in the yard of the house, living uder the hot tub. I had a concept that was similar, but using 45 degree symmetry, that I made from a (rectangle) Animal Kingdom map, but when I got home and tried to reproduce it I couldn’t get it to work. Don’t know why I didn’t think of the hex base sooner; it’s perfect for animals with equal-length legs, and toes. So the approach was solid although the first attempt was not prefect. Made a 2nd attempt with refined proportions, head and tail. It’s pretty close, I probably need one more try, mainly to fine-tune the head. So watch this space.

As long as I can remember I’ve liked geometry.

I’ve been doing origami polyhedra for quite some time, and you can see some of the ones I’ve designed on my Origami Page. My approach is mainly from single sheet, in contrast the more common modular approach. When I first started, I thought that it was new, largely unexplored territory, and I could do something really interesting. Soon I could see it was a rich area of endeavor, but also very challenging. Around that time I met John Montroll, and he was way ahead of me down this path. In fact he was about to release a book on origami polyhedra, and was working on a second one. This was great for me, because he was eager to have people test his diagrams, and was very generous with his ideas, and I learned a lot from our discussions. On the other hand, he pretty much had the basics covered and then some, like several versions of the platonic solids, and some prisms and Archimedean solids and other shapes. So I had to go a good deal further to get into original territory.

One of my all-time favorite shapes has always been the Stellated Dodecahedron, which is the 3-D analog of the pentagram. (Which, BTW is the 4D analog of the Tetrahedron, but since no one folds 4-D origami, that’s a bit outside the scope of this discussion.) I’ve designed and attempted to fold various versions of this shape over time.

Here is a design from a single square. I actually succeeded in folding one, from a giant (24″) sheet of foil paper. It worked, but I would not call the result great in terms of the level of craft. I tried another from a smaller (14″ or so) piece of thickish (for origami) paper, but never completed it. The problem is that once you get towards the end, there are many flaps of extra paper to deal with, and the model wants to spring apart. This, combined with the limitation of having only two hands, makes it very tricky to close. I may give this design another try, but I’ve been exploring other avenues.

Last summer at the OUSA Annual Convention I was playing around with ideas for this shape again, and it occurred to me to try it from a 2:1 rectangle. It was still a single sheet, but provide more edge relative to the paper’s area, so it ought to reduce the problem of extra flaps of paper to hide. I have a design for a 2:1 icosahedron which is really efficient and easy to fold, and it didn’t take too long to come up with a regular dodecahedron, which is the base for the stellated version. When I went ahead and folded it, it realized it was so efficient that there was not enough paper to make a lock, so I’d need to go back and modify my design be setting it into a slightly larger rectangle. So I tried again. Still making the model close was a bit of a challenge. Doable, but requiring some effort.

Then over Christmas vacation, I finally had some origami time again, and this time I went for a version made from 2 squares, each of which comprise half the finished model. This is much easier to fold because you can reach inside each half as you’re making it, and the leftover flaps of paper become tabs that fit into the opposite half, nicely solving the problem of what to do with the leftover bits. At the end, the two halves lock together tightly and securely. The resulting model is quite attractive, because it’s much easier not to crush it as you’re putting it together. The examples below are made from (2 sheets each of) 6″ foil paper and 8.5″ photocopy paper.

Which brings up the question: Origami purists like to only work for a single square sheet. Which is more of a “cheat”: to use two squares or one rectangle?

Coming Soon: crease patterns for the 3 methods for Stellated Dodecahedra.