Alright, this is my last post on this site! I am officially moving everything over to my new site url. Again, followers will also be moved over. If you followed this site using a WordPress account and you want to receive email notifications, you will have to sign up for them on the new site.
Now, without further ado, I present to you my new site: Forms of Fiction!
Alright, another announcement! I posted a little while ago about updating the website and moving it to a new link. The website is more or less done at this point, so I will shortly be transferring everything from this site to the new one. Everyone who is subscribed will automatically move to the other site. Email subscribers will still receive emails about new posts as before. WordPress subscribers will only see new posts in the WordPress reader, unless they enter an email address on the new website to join the mailing list. This site will stay online, at least for a little while, after the new one goes up.
Thanks for reading!
See you soon on the new site.
Greetings, everyone. I don’t have a new piece to show you today, but I do have an announcement. It should be quick and painless. As many (some) of you might know, I’ve been running this blog for more than 5 years now (Happy New Years by the way). I started it back in 2012 when I was first starting to dabble in origami. That was quite a while ago and the site is very different than it once was. Since then, I discovered tessellations and dove deep into working with them, to the neglect of basically every other form of origami. The site was started as just a place for me to share pictures of fun things that I made, but since I started working with tessellations and designing my own pieces, I’ve felt like I wanted to take my content in a different direction. Hence, it’s time for changes. I want to make the site more focused on tessellations. I also want to make it less of a hobby site and more of a cohesive, concentrated art site. All that being said, I’m planning on updating and changing the site to better reflect where I want to go with my work. The art itself will be more or less the same, but the presentation will change. The website itself is probably going to change quite a lot. However, the main point I wanted to mention is that the site’s address will most likely change. Hopefully these changes will take place within the next few weeks, so if you get a notification about a post from a site with a different name than this one that’s posting the same kind of art as this one, it’s still this site. Additionally, the site may be down for a bit as I figure out how to redesign it. Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. The main differences will be aesthetic and thematic, but the art will look mostly the same. If you came for the tessellations originally, they won’t be going away. Thanks to everyone who has stuck around for all these years and thanks reading this!
For the first time in nearly a year, I have finished a new tessellation. I make them so slowly that I don’t have anything to post very often. As a result, this is only my second post in 2017 and it’s already September. Oh well. Happy September to all!
Notwithstanding all that, this piece is an experiment with offset square twists, like in this piece I made a few years ago. Actually, that was four years ago already which is crazy. I’ve been running this site for a long time.
Anyway, I sketched out an idea using offset squares twists sometime last summer. Nothing happened with that for a while, obviously, but I finally got around to implementing to it. The result is composition number twenty six. All the images are below: browse at your own risk.
Front backlit:
Close up:
This part of the piece is the starting point. The octagonal ring around the nine offset square twists was the original idea I sketched out last summer. You can see how the offset square twists are different from normal square twists. They don’t directly line up vertically or horizontally. The result is an interesting cock-eyed effect which you can see below.
Close up of the offset square twists:
Two pleats extend out from each side of an offset square twist, as opposed to normal twists which usually only have one. This is what creates the thick bands between the squares.
Close up of the intersection of the octagonal rings:
This twist construction is situated comfortably between the short edges of the octagonal rings. Or maybe not so comfortably, because most of the pleats from the rings are directed into it. Since the offset square twists produce pleats that don’t line up very well, this was a bit of a nightmare to work with. This was by far the most challenging part of the piece to design. It took many attempts before I was able to make it work. The final result is this rather strange construction, involving a rotated square within another rotated square, as seen below
Closeup of the intersection between adjacent ring-sides:
Each octagonal ring has four sides that each directly line up with a side from another ring. This picture is a closeup of the intersection created from those sides.
Edge close ups:
Since the whole design is skewed by the offset square twists, the edge of the piece isn’t symmetrical. This made it a little more challenging to design an interesting border. I like the result, though. It’s different than my other designs, but it looks interesting. In the picture below, you can see the edge’s asymmetry. The right side extends down further than the left side because of the skew.
Reverse backlit:
Close up:
This is the reverse side of an octagonal ring. I like the flat, cobble stone appearance. The offset square twists don’t have open backs so it makes this part of the reverse entirely flat.
Close up of ring intersection reverse:
This is the reverse of one of the twist constructions between the octagonal rings.
Close up of the reverse of the intersection of two adjacent ring sides:
Edge close ups:
Again, you can see the asymmetry in the edge. The left side is now lower, as this is the reverse side of the piece.
Non-backlit front:
Close up of a ring:
The rings have quite a few layers so they pop out more than the offset twists. I like how it gives the twists an embedded look.
Close up of twist between rings:
These also have quite a few layers, so they are the highest points in the piece.
Close up of the intersection between adjacent ring sides:
Reverse non-backlit:
Close up of octagonal ring reverse:
Close up of ring intersection reverse:
Close up of the reverse of the intersection of adjacent octagonal rings:
All told, I think I spent more time working on this piece than anything else I’ve made before. I had the idea in July or August of last summer, when I sketched out a very rough draft. From there, it has taken me more than a year to design the piece and fold it. As mentioned several times before, offset square twists produce pleats that don’t line up very well. Typically, twists produce pleats that line up nicely at a single point. The pleats that came off of these twists lined up around a central point, instead of one common point of intersection. This is why those square twist constructions between the rings were so hard to fold and design. There were pleats going in every direction, produced by the offset square twists. I went through a ton of different prototypes before I found something that worked and didn’t look bad. The process took even longer because I would get tired of working on it quickly, when I couldn’t find a solution. After months of kind of working on the design, I finally got something that I was satisfied with sometime around June of this year. Since my summer was completely booked, I wasn’t actually able to implement my design until around the second week of August. After that, it took me a while to photograph the piece and write this post. I’m very glad I finished it, though. I wasn’t sure if I ever actually would…
The piece was folded from a square piece of paper, about 35 inches in width. This is one of the few larger designs I’ve made that use a square grid instead of a triangle grid (the other being this one). Square grids just don’t appeal to me as much as triangle grids, but I really like how this piece turned out. In the future, I will definitely explore them more.
Last time I designed a piece with offset square twists (and by “with”, I mean it was literally only offset square twists), I called it “Windfarm“. The offset square twists give me a sense of movement. Since they’re offset, several of them together create a rippling, moving kind of effect. They also remind me of turbines or propellers; something that catches or moves the wind. For this piece, I wanted to build on that idea a little bit. I created something that is, to me, reminiscent of an airborne vehicle. A Wind Lord’s Chariot, if you will. It’s a fantastical idea, to be sure, but I like that kind of stuff. Fantasy gets my mental gears spinning. That’s basically the story behind the name. Sue me.
That’s also basically all I have to say say about this piece. I’m glad it’s finally done. Like I always say, I have several ideas to work on in the near future. We will see if they come to fruition this year. Additionally, I’ve been thinking about the direction I want to take this site in the future. Be on the look out for information about changes coming sometime- possibly -soon. I’m not planning on changing content, but I want to revitalize the presentation a bit.
Anyway, if you made it this far, thanks for reading through that wall of text. Subscribe to keep up with future compositions and news in the future. Also give my Facebook page a like for content that’s not different at all from the stuff here (except sometimes work-in-progress pictures)!
Thanks for reading!
Hello. I only posted two things in 2016. 2017 has started (happy new year and all that) and it is now May. As I have not posted anything until now, I am not on a good path to being creatively productive this year. We shall see though, shan’t we? Anyway, this is something I made for an end-of-semester project. It’s not really even a real piece, in a way. I wouldn’t have made something like this unless I had to. It’s quite different from normal. Still, I like it quite a bit and I need to post something this year, don’t I? So here we go.
The piece is kind of like a three dimensional tessellation. I used the three regular tileable polygons, squares, triangle and hexagons, on the main panel of the piece. Those shapes form the bases of the pyramids that cover the main panel. As you can see below, squares are on the left wing, triangles are in the center and hexagons are on the right wing. The shapes suspended from the top are the platonic solids, the five regular polyhedron that can be made with regular polygons. They aren’t floating. They’re just attached to the wooden skewers with fishing line which you can’t see. Oops, I gave away the secret. Okay, picture time. I’m done talking.
Front picture:
It’s been so long since I posted something that hasn’t been a tessellation that I don’t even know how to label this picture. There isn’t a back picture, so saying front picture is a little bit silly. But it is from the front.
The piece is made from a strip of cardboard that I painted white. The pyramids are all attached to the cardboard with hot glue.
Another front picture:
These labels are lazy. It’s been a long day.
All of the suspended solids are simple paper cut outs (example: icosahedron net). I took the flattened form of each solid, folded them and glued them together. I know, I cheated by using glue and a knife. It’s awful. I didn’t have time to do anything else though.
Tetrahedron closeup:
Hexahedron (cube) closeup:
Octahedron closeup:
Dodecahedron closeup:
Icosahedron closeup:
These pyramids were my original starting point for the piece. I think they turned out pretty well. I wanted to make them all backlit, but I didn’t get a chance to do that. Maybe some time in the future.
Closeup of triangular pyramids:
Closeup of square pyramids:
Closeup of hexagonal pyramids:
There were only a few hexagons because they took up a lot of room. I was only able to fit six on the rest of the cardboard I had. That’s okay though, they took forever to make.
Angled closeups:
This was a very different piece than what I normally make. It was interesting to design and assemble. I had a good time with it. I might experiment more with this kind of thing in the future, but for now it’s back to regular tessellations. I finally have something in the works that I think will turn out well. The piece originally had a name, but I decided to get rid of it. The piece is so different from what I normally do that I figured Untitled was an appropriate name. In regards to the details of the piece, it was made out of paper from a sketchbook. I’m not sure how many sheets it was, but I used almost the entire sketchbook so it was a fair amount. The general idea for the piece is that it’s a landscape described with geometric shapes. I see the main panel as the sky or the horizon, while the suspended solids could be stars or the universe overhead. The idea of using geometric shapes to make sculptures/representations of real things is interesting. This piece was the first time I’ve tried to do so. There’s definitely potential to make some interesting things in the future. Anyway, this was a lot less mechanically intensive than normal (although I did burn myself with hot glue and that kind of hurt). It still took me probably around twenty hours to fold and assemble all the parts. There were a lot of parts. One of the things I like best about it is that it’s pretty simple and minimal. There are a lot of shapes, but they are all straightforward and the patterns aren’t overwhelming. Photographing it was a challenge. I didn’t have the ability to backlight it and get some good photos that way. The pictures didn’t out alright. They get the point across at least. Anyway, that’s really all I have to say about this. I just wanted to post it. Hopefully the pictures and my rambling were interesting, at least a little.
Thanks for reading! More pieces will be forthcoming, hopefully within the year. Until then, stay tuned. Thanks to all of you who stick around for these extremely infrequent updates.
My new posting schedule appears to have turned into one piece about once or twice per year and no more. It’s been a while, but here’s a new thing for you. It has a whole lot of triangles and a few other shapes. That’s all there is to it. You can leave now if you want.
Triangle twists were the inspiration for this piece: I wanted to see what interesting ways you could arrange them and ended up with this. As a result, there are a lot of triangles in the design. I’ll probably ending up trying something similar again, I like the idea. Expect it in a year or two. That’s the soonest I’ll find time to do it, probably.
Now browse the pictures at your leisure.
Front backlit:
Center close up:
I like the stars in the middle. They have a little bit of asymmetry.
The rhombuses in the corner of the hexagon surrounding the star were the starting point for this piece. I started with that configuration of triangle twists when I was experimenting and went from there. They’re just made up of 8 triangle twists.
Corner close up:
As you can see, there are indeed many triangle twists in this piece. Instead of doing a more open border like I normally do, I filled in every bit of empty space with triangles. I like the compact, solid look they give the design. It looks less like separate woven parts, like my other pieces normally do, and more like it’s one whole made of fused pieces.
Edge close up:
(With even more triangle twists.)
Intersection close up:
For lack of a better term, the ‘inner border’ of large hexagons separate the stars and their group of triangle twist rhombuses from one another. Without this inner border dividing the triangle twists into separate groups, the entire design would have been pretty much only triangle twist. That would have been kind of boring, don’t you think?
I like the hexagon formed by the three rhombuses surrounding the center of the intersection. Not for any real reason. I just like it.
Reverse backlit:
Since triangle twists aren’t open backed, the reverse of the design has almost no texture. You can still see the front side coming through with the light and it looks interesting, but it’s almost completely flat.
Center close up:
Edge close up:
Corner close up:
Front non backlit:
My sincerest of apologies for the lighting, I still haven’t figured this out after so long.
You can see that the inner border of hexagons pops up from the rest of the piece a little bit. It’s essentially laid over the top of the rest of the design which means it isn’t anchored down particularly well by any other pleats, so it doesn’t stay flat. It gives the piece an interesting sense of depth.
Center close up:
Edge close up:
Corner close up:
Intersection close up:
Reverse non backlit:
I don’t think the reverse is particularly interesting without back lighting. As I said before, it’s very flat. Without the light coming through, there isn’t much going on. But for the sake of completion, here are the pictures.
Center close up:
Edge close up:
Corner close up:
Like normal, this piece was folded from a single hexagonal piece of paper about 35 inches in width. Also like normal, this piece has long been in the works. It took me quite a while to find the time to work on it, even though I started it initially all the way back in May. I estimate it took somewhere around 40 hours to complete, but that was spread out over a period of about 5 months between now and May. It was a fairly standard length project in terms of hours though..
As I said earlier, this piece was inspired by triangle twists. I just wanted to see what I could make if I arranged a bunch of triangle twists into rhombus shapes (you can see this around the stars at the center of each section like I mentioned before. There are six of them around each star but they are kind of hard to see. They are made up of triangle twists.). I wanted to make them larger, but that took up too much space so I kept them fairly small. This piece is the result of a little bit of messing around with those rhombuses.
The funny thing about this design is that it is very geometrically simple even though the end result looks complicated. Triangle twists are the simplest thing you can do in a triangle grid after single pleats and this designed is composed of them almost solely. Without the hexagonal pattern of inner borders, it would simply be a grid full of triangle twists, which would not be very interesting. The inner borders don’t add all that much more complexity either. The stars that are in each cluster are modifications of the pleats for triangle twists, so they could also be reduced to triangle twists as well. In a way, you could consider this the simplest piece I have designed. That makes it interesting, though. Still, despite the fact that this is such a geometrically simple piece, it was actually rather difficult to fold. The amount of pleats from all of the different triangle twists and the inner borders made it a challenge to keep track of everything and get the pleats in the correct places.
Since the design has so many twists, it ended up being smaller relative to my other pieces. Twists take up a lot of room so when you have a lot of them the resulting tessellation is much smaller. My other pieces typically have a much more open design. This one is very full and closed in. To me, it looks like some kind of paved courtyard with round wells in the center of each cluster. (That may or may not be where half of the name came from. Figure it out.)
All in all, I’m happy with how it turned out. I will definitely revisit the concepts used in this design, I liked how they turned out.
That’s all I have to say about this piece. Check back again in a few months (probably more than a few) if you want to see my next piece. I have a few ideas in progress that will hopefully be finished sooner rather than later.
Thanks for reading. I’ll see you again in a few months or more.
After nearly six months, I finally have a new piece to post. Surprise to all my subscribers! I appreciate you not unsubscribing during my long period of quiet.
This has been in progress off and on since mid-December. It’s gone through several iterations and I was originally planning to do it on a larger scale, but that didn’t turn out well so I tried again. But I’m getting ahead of myself. You haven’t even seen the piece yet, so here it is.
Front backlit:
Closeup:
Closeup of central twist:
The center of the molecule was originally just a normal hexagon twist, but I though that was too boring so I experimented with different designs until I found something I liked. The middle hexagon is a normal hexagon twist, just scaled down from what it was before. The six ‘petals’ are somewhat distorted teardrop twists that have their points at the center of the hexagon. They’re the same shape as the ones in the large outer ring, but their pleats are arranged differently. The end result definitely looks like a snowflake. I wasn’t sure if there would be enough space between the petals to let light through, but it turned out well.
Closeup of molecule intersection:
These were rather difficult to fold, because they are the intersections of a ton of pleats from the molecules. One of the critical pleats for making this part of the design lie flat, which you can’t see, has an awkward landmark which made it difficult to crease in and collapse. Again, I wasn’t sure how these would turn out, but because of the sheer number of pleats. This isn’t very high quality paper and it had a hard time surviving the onslaught of pleats that all converged here. I’m pretty happy with how they ended up.
I like this almost negative space-hexagon twist here. It looks like the opposite of a hexagon twist, where the twist created a cavity instead of adding layers (in other words, negative space). Most of my designs don’t normally end up with negative space like this, which is why I decided to put it in. It also creates a large, blank rhombus on the reverse side which I like as well.
Border:
I had almost no room for a border on this design because it used most of the grid. I still tried though, because I love making borders. This isn’t really much of a border, but I still like how it looks. I quite like the rolling contour that I ended up with.
This picture is the middle of one of the edges:
This one is one of the corners of the design. I really like the angled corners in the center of this picture. It’s a small detail, but I think it adds a lot to the contour.
Reverse backlit:
The reverse of this piece is pretty similar to the front.
Some more closeups:
You can see the large rhombuses I was talking about earlier. There’s six of them circling around the center twist.
This is the reverse of the molecule intersection. The darker stripe on the central triangle is the awkward pleat I was talking about earlier.
More closeups:
Front non-backlit:
The lighting on these are really bad. I’m going to redo them later, but for now this is what you have. The most interesting points of the design come out when backlit, anyway.
These frontlit pictures do give you a nice view of the negative space hexagons, though. You can see the depth they create.
Reverse non-backlit:
I don’t find the reverse particularly interesting without the back lighting so I only have a couple pictures. I think it’s a little too flat.
I’ve had a draft of this post written for about a week, but I couldn’t post it because I didn’t have a name for it. It seems like all of my designs have something to do with flowers or stars or crystals or something similar. I tried to shy away from that a little, but it still ended up being star themed. Oh well. Tessellations are just naturally evocative of stars and flowers, I guess. I’ll let you decide what the name means in relation to the piece.
Overall, I’d estimate this piece took close to 50-60 hours to fold. A little more than half of that was spent on my first attempt which did not turn out how I wanted it to. In fact, it didn’t turn out at all because I didn’t finish it. Originally, I had a grid divided into 128ths, but that turned out to be too much for the paper. It more or less fell apart and dissolved into paper mush. It got to the point where I wasn’t able to finish it because I am a peasant who lacks skill. Obviously, I took the easy way out and decided to enlarge the grid from 128ths to 64ths. Unfortunately, I had to scrap probably more than 30 hours worth of work. So sad. Increasing the grid size meant the design was about three times larger and much easier to work with. It turned out a lot better, so I think it was worth it. I wasn’t able to fit as much of the pattern onto the paper, though. I’ll probably try making a 128th grid version with different paper at some point in the future, but that will not be for a while. I also had the ambitious plan of filming a time lapse of the entire thing, but I stopped doing that about 75% of the way through my first attempt. It’s tiring to set up my film setup and then try to keep everything looking good for the camera for a five hour folding session. I didn’t even try for my second attempt. The plan is to film another piece that won’t take quite as long. I may also upload the partial time lapse to my Facebook page, but I haven’t decided yet. So look for that, and if it doesn’t show up within a few weeks (or months), it probably isn’t happening.
The design came about as I was experimenting with different configurations of teardrop twists. I came up with the central ring of twelve teardrop twist pairs and then spent quite a while experimenting with the inner hexagon twist. I had the design sitting around since sometime last year, but I didn’t get around to starting to implement it until December, as I said. It was actually done about three weeks ago, but it took me a while to get around to writing this post. Hopefully you were all waiting with bated breath for my next piece.
This was definitely a difficult piece to fold, but I’m happy with how it turned out. With that, I’ll leave you be. Probably for at least three more months.
Thanks for reading! Like if you liked this and subscribe if you want to.
It’s my blog anniversary. The seventh of this month marks the third year of the existence of this blog. Well, approximately. I would say again, but last time this happened was a year ago. Most of you have probably forgot that I did this last year, since it was a whole year ago. It doesn’t feel like that long ago for me, which I was I almost said again. While it is true that it is again, since I’ve already had anniversaries, making this a repetition, I didn’t see value in doing that. Most of you (probably) don’t think about this site as much as I do, so, like I said, you most likely forgot about last years post. It was lackluster anyway. This one is going to be so much better, for sure. Anyway, like I said, I probably think about this site much more often than my readers. It is mine after all, and I think it’s a fundamental aspect of human nature to be self centered and…
Actually, never mind. I don’t even know what I’m talking about so I’ll stop rambling.
It really doesn’t seem like that long ago since my last anniversary and I don’t have anything new to post. I’ve been working on lots of things, but nothings been finished yet. So here, have a picture of a cube. It’s modular.
Beautiful right? As you can see, it’s very cube-like. Mostly because it is a cube. It’s as simple as possible, but I still like it. Just the mere fact that this abstract idea of a ‘cube’ which I had in my head before making this actually exists in a tangible form is neat. Not that it was hard to make. The units are probably about the simplest they could be. Still, I like it. Tangible geometry is enjoyable.
This is the very beginnings of a prototype of a design. I have at least three ‘projects’ that I’ve been working on that aren’t anywhere near completion yet. I say ‘projects’ because I’ve had difficulty making any progress on any of them, so they’re really only the ideas or prototypes of projects. I’ve been trying to get something to a presentable state to quench the drought up here, but I haven’t had much luck. Although not even two months isn’t an unusual length for these droughts. No need to be alarmed yet. Look for at least one new piece before my next anniversary. I solemnly promise to you, my faithful viewers, that I will post at least one piece per 365 days. That is my word.
Looking back, it’s been a pretty okay year. I posted 6 pieces, 5 of which were new compositions and one which was a remake of an older piece. Not as much as the year before, when I posted 9 pieces, but if you were keeping track of things like that, you don’t need me to tell you to be disappointed. I’ve definitely improved over the past year, with my recent pieces being much more complicated than a year ago. Well, maybe a little more than a year ago. Around early 2014. So maybe I haven’t improved that much. Eh. I suppose that’s how things go. Life never goes the way you want it to and- never mind. I’m not going to say something deep and philosophical. I fold paper, I’m not a philosopher.
Here’s to many more anniversary posts with pictures of nothing much. And maybe one or two more followers. I can’t be too ambitious now.
A wild post appears!
This piece is a full version of the little Crystal Flower piece I made a few years back. I wasn’t sure how to finish it then, when I was really just getting started, but I happened to be looking at it a few months back and suddenly saw how it could go together. I started working on it almost right after finishing Composition Twenty One, which was about two weeks ago and I finished it last weekend. It was supposed to go up on Monday and I started the draft, but didn’t have to time to finish it. Apparently though, since I was putting the draft together on my phone, it decided to post it before I had even put all the pictures in. So if you saw the post that only said ‘e’ in it, here’s the full version for you. (I know a few of you saw it and liked it. I appreciate the quick views, it’s encouraging. Plus, that’s how I figured out the draft had been posted.)
Since the piece is an extension of Crystal Flower, I decided to give it an uncreative name and call it Garden of Crystals. The original Crystal Flower piece was composed of only one of the flowers you can see in the image below.
Front backlit:
The flowers open up from the center outwards, in two concentric rings, one of partially opened flowers and one of fully opened flowers. In the center, you can see a single fully closed flower.
Closed flower close up:
Their isn’t any massive difference between them, but you should be able to see the changing hexagon twist in the middle of the flower. In the closed flower, I put the twist fully on the reverse side. In the half open flower, I pushed some of the twist pleats to the front, and in the open flower, I moved the entire twist to the front.
Half open flower close up:
You can see the hexagon twist in the fully open flower:
The intersection between the flowers was where the design originally stopped, because I didn’t know what to do with all the creases. You should be able to see a ring of hexagons around the outer perimeter of the original where these intersections would go later.
Close up of a flower intersection:
I didn’t put a border on this one, because I liked the natural look of of all the creases radiating out to the edges and creating a star shaped edge. Still, you get close up of the edge. Enjoy it.
On retrospect, it’s not that great of a picture, but just deal with it.
Rear backlit:
Closed flower rear. You can see the hexagon twist on the reverse of the paper.
You can’t see much difference with the partially open flower from this side, although you can see some missing pleats around the hexagon, hopefully.
The fully opened flower isn’t that different either, but you can see the hexagon twist is gone.
Reverse side of a flower intersection:
Here’s a crooked shot of the reverse of the edge. Because why not?
The frontlit shots are abominable because I tried to take them after my natural light source was gone. I tried shining some lights on the piece, like I did with my last one, but glassine is much more reflective than normal paper, so they look all shiny and washed out. Some of them are too dark. I’ll try to retake them later, so you can at least see them. The close ups aren’t as bad, though. Also, for whatever reason, I didn’t take full shots of the front and back, there partially zoomed in, which I’ll also try to fix later.
Front frontlit:
Closed flower close up:
Half way open flower close up:
Fully open flower close up:
Here’s an edge.
Reverse frontlit:
Closed flower reverse:
Half way open flower reverse:
Fully open flower reverse:
So that’s that. I’m not as amazed with it as my previous piece. I mostly did it for the sake of finishing my previous design, but I still like it. It’s nice and pretty simple, as far as these things go. It took me about two weeks of non-constant work to fold from a sheet of glassine paper, much less time than my previous piece. The mass of pleats on the edges were a nightmare to try to flatten and make presentable, until I discovered lightly wetting the paper with a paint brush and ironing it dry works extremely well for keeping things flat. I’ll definitely be using the technique again, but carefully, because too much water causes the paper to wrinkle when I dry it. The funny thing is that glassine absorbs water like a sponge. I expected to be a little more water resistant since it’s glossy, so I was surprised by that and accidentally used too much water on a few corners, but you can’t see the wrinkles, so just forget about them.
There’s not really much to say about this piece. it’s relatively simple and was easy to fold and I probably said what I wanted to say on the original post for Crystal Flower. One thing I do like is the network of lines created on the reverse side where the tips of the flower petals are formed on the front side. They’re the result of sixty degree pleat intersections and were quite tedious to put in, since I waited to finish them until last.
Other than that, the piece went smoothly and I’m working on my next idea(s) which may be up soon or in a very long time. Don’t expect a new post in (almost) two weeks, like this one, but hopefully it’ll be interesting when it comes. I have quite a few ideas that I really like and need to try.
I took one WIP while I was working on this, because I forgot to at other points. I guess I’ll post that on the Facebook page. Or not. We’ll see. For now, I’m done writing. It’s quite late, although you’ll be reading this in the morning since that’s when I’m going to schedule it to go up, and I’m going to bed now.
See you at Composition Twenty Three, whatever it ends up being. Thanks for reading and life if you like or subscribe if you want to.
New piece! It’s my biggest yet and took a huge amount of time. So validate me by reading this and showing me it wasn’t a waste of time.
Or don’t. I don’t need you. I won’t go cry in a corner, I swear.
Front backlit:
The center of the design is a kind of ‘double hexagon twist’ which you can see in the middle of the piece. Normal hexagon twists (six sides) are formed at the intersection of six pleats, but as you can see in the picture, the center of this piece has twelve pleats intersecting. It’s always harder to deal with larger amounts of pleats and I didn’t want to do one massive dodecahedron twist. Instead, I came up with this weird double twist. The outer hexagon you can see is actually a hexagon made up of pleat intersections, so it’s not actually a twist at all. The inner hexagon is formed from the thicker pleats that cross the sides of the outer hexagon and it actually is a twist. Since it’s formed on top of the outer hexagon, it shrinks it down quite a bit, which is where the ‘swirl effect’ that you can see comes from.
Center close up:
Another close up. Here you can see the outer and inner hexagons better as well as the ‘swirl effect.’ I think it’s a much more visually appealing way to deal with the twelve pleats than a dodecahedron would be, because it would be just one solid twist. The little details of this twist make up for the difficulty of folding it. I used some weird tricks to get it to collapse right.
The pattern is made up of ‘nodes’ of irregular hexagon twists, as shown below. They form a ring of six about the hexagon twists. You can see it better in the first picture. The irregular hexagon twists that compose these nodes are what I started with when I was designing this piece. I had to figure out how to get them to fit together right and this node structure was what I came up with. I quite like it. It’s nicely symmetrical and it’s actually a nonagon (nine sides), which I don’t find to often.
Close up of one of the “nodes”:
Close up of node intersection:
Close up of design’s border:
This is a corner. I always like the corners of the borders I put around designs. So here, look at another one. 
Reverse backlit:
Close up:
This is is the reverse of the central double hexagon twist:
Reverse of a node:
Reverse of a node intersection:
Close up of the reverse border:
Corner reverse:
Front non-backlit:
Center close up:
Node close up:
Node intersection close up:
Border close up:
Another corner:
Reverse non-backlit:
Center reverse:
Node reverse:
Node intersection reverse:
Border reverse close up:
I started working on this piece more than four weeks ago with a grid I folded sometime last year. I had meant to use it for something, but I changed my mind and decided to use it for this design instead. I think I mentioned I had planned to do make this in another post, but it took me a while to get around to it. As I said at the top, this is my biggest piece. From top to bottom, it measure approximately twenty two inches, folded from a sheet of paper about thirty inches wide. My previous largest piece was only about half the size, I think. I used a large roll of plain paper I picked up from the store, so I wasn’t sure if it would be strong enough. One of the reasons I prefer glassine is because it’s strong and thin, but this paper held up well, even though this was a complex design.
As I said earlier, this design took me a very long time. Nearly three weeks of (not) constant weeks plus laziness in posting this means I started the project more than a month ago. It would have taken longer still if I hadn’t done the grid sometime last year for another project, like I said. Part of the reason it took so long was because of the complexity of the design, which naturally takes more time. The thing I found difficult was that there was no ‘breathing points’, so to speak. There were no spots where the design would fold flat while I was working on it without putting in large amounts of extraneous creases. I try to avoid doing that, for the most part, because they show up on the final piece if there’s too many. Unfortunately, I couldn’t avoid it, but it was my own fault. I didn’t think I needed to put in all of the pre-creases and it was taking too long. I hadn’t anticipated how difficult it would be to make the model lay flat, so I had to put all of the pre-creases in and try to flatten it to a workable state at the same time. Moral of the story, trying to save time takes longer. You have been warned.
Anyway, the name comes from woven appearance of the back side. The wide pleats look they are woven together around the stars, like a foundation. So there’s stars, there’s a foundation that looks woven. A Celestial Woven Foundation, obviously. The back side is like the foundation that holds up the heavens, represents by the stars. The nodes, I guess, are the nebulous coverings of the foundation. Like the blackness of space. I guess
And that’s all. Congratulations if you read through all of that, and looked at all the pictures. There’s a lot more than I normally take, but I really liked the design. Yes, I know I say that every time. About liking the design, that is. Hey, I’m just a proud artist and I’ve got nothing else going for me.
I took a lot of not particularly useful pictures work in progress pictures which don’t reveal the creative process all that well. I’ll put them on my Facebook page. (Too avoid using up space on this site’s media server. Ha.) So go look there if you want to see them. Oh yeah, I’m working on setting up a contraption for myself to film timelapses, so I filmed myself folding a simple piece that I’ll put in the same place, for whoever wants to see it. It’s about four minutes, I think.
Thanks for reading. Like if you like and subscribe if you want to. Actually, scratch that. I always say that, but I want on person to subscribe so I have twenty subscribers. I beg you. Well, not really. Do it if you want to. Thanks.
P.S. In case you didn’t notice, I didn’t complain about my photography this time. I experimented with some new methods for both backlit and non-backlit photographs. The backlit ones are definitely better, and I think the non-backlit ones are better too. They’re definitely brighter. Non-backlit doesn’t sound right. Does frontlit sound better? I’ll say that next time. See you at Composition 22. (Yes. I have started it.)
Paper Sandwich 
