It’s probably fairly obvious that this model is a departure from my normal folding style. Almost all of the folding I’ve done recently has been highly mathematically, precise, and planned. I have folded more organic pieces before, but it’s been a long time. Even those pieces were fairly structured and mathematically based.
This is probably first piece I’ve ever folded without making any actual measurements, and it was completely an experiment. I started by tearing a vaguely round-ish piece of paper from a large scrap I had sitting around. I used a compass to estimate some sizes and divisions and a ruler as a straightedge, but the rest was all free-folded. The flat base is in the center of the paper. I knew there would be a lot of extra paper around the edges, but I didn’t know what the outer sections would look like until I was mostly done folding. I did several rounds of wet-folding and taping the paper into various shapes until I got the paper into a shape I liked.
I had a lot of fun folding something completely free-form, and hopefully I’ll try it again sometime. I’ve been wanting to do some more organic designs for a while. Eventually I’d like to develop a folding approach somewhere between the purely mathematical and the purely free-form, but that’s something I’m still figuring out how to approach.
