Category: Origami

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!