Search Results for: curved vases

I’ve been working recently on a series of vases where I’ve been exploring cutting lace-like shapes into the vase. This piece is the latest in that series, moving away from only angular shapes of the cutouts. The cutout shapes spiral back and forth around the vase form and emerge as a flare from the top edge.

Similar to one of the other vases, I painted only the inside of the paper. The cutout sections of the paper reveal pops of the brighter color inside. I played a bit with cutting the curves using templates but ended up cutting most of the curves freehand. I was surprised how smoothly that went – and I’m still very surprised that I haven’t run into any major issues in any of these vases with cutting too far and destroying the paper!

I recently posted a few test folds of pleated tubes. In this model, I’ve used those pleats in a more finished vase-like form. The curve here reminds me of a question mark, or of a swan’s neck.

The triangular shape means that each pleat requires a lot fewer folds and reference points than my previous curved-neck vases with 10 sides. I’m still exploring whether this is a direction I’m interested in turning into a series.

This piece is a continuation of my series of curved-neck vases. The neck is a series of crimp bends to create the curve. This is from a couple years ago and spent most of a year at the Science Museum Oklahoma, but I didn’t get it posted then.

I like the look of these forms and how much more organic they are than many of my more purely geometric designs. Unfortunately, the series of crimp-folds along the neck is such a pain to fold that I’m not in a hurry to add any more to the series.

This model is the second in my series of curved-neck vases. These models use the same geometric crimp-bends that I’ve been using my geometrically distorted vases, but the series of bends creates the illusion of a curve. The series of bends is a lot of work to fold, but I like how this model has a different feel from the more strictly geometric pieces I’ve done for a long time.

Another piece in my series of lacy vases. After a bunch of increasingly complicated models, I decided to pare things back. This vase only has only a handful of straight-line folds, and the entire surface of the paper is visible (except for the base). The model is square at the top and bottom and octagonal in the middle, and I used the angled panels transitioning between the two as black lacy contrast panels. I like the simplicity here where the lace pattern is able to stand out more, as a contrast to my more complex pieces where the lace is one of many design elements.

It’s a little tricky to see, but the view of the inside gives a bit of a view of how I created the lace. For this pattern, I drew curved lines with a pencil, erasing and re-drawing until I was happy with the overall pattern. Then, I cut out the areas between the drawn lines, leaving ~1 mm margin between the pencil line in the middle and my cut line. That means the black lines that are left after the cutting are ~2 mm wide. I like leaving the traces of my work process on the inside of the vase as reminder that this is all handcrafted and not machine-made.

Another new piece with lacy cutouts. This piece uses a mix of two cutout shapes: the curved shapes I started using recently, and a belt of squares around the middle. As I’ve gotten more comfortable with cutouts, I’ve reached a point where I’m more okay with having sections of the lace pattern where any one mistake will stand out.

I’ve played a bit with different folding sequences as I’ve developed the series. For all of my painted vases, I always start by painting the paper. When laying out the lace, I’m very careful to make sure the cutouts don’t interfere with the structural folds. For the first few pieces in the series, I scored the paper and cut the lace while it was flat, then pre-creased and folded. In the more recent pieces, I’ve decided it works better to pre-crease the paper before cutting the lace pattern. It’s sometimes tricky to cut the lace accurately when the paper isn’t completely flat, but that reduces the risk of tearing the paper near the lace cutouts while I’m pre-creasing.

This piece is a continuation of my series of vases with lacy cutouts. I started playing recently with using curved cutout shapes to form the lacy pattern, and this piece uses a similar type of cutouts. Before we get to the vase, here’s the mostly-finished lace pattern on the pre-creased paper:

The new element in this vase is that the lace flare at the top edge flows over the top edge and curves back down. Since the cut paper is so delicate, it was tricky to get that section to flip over correctly without ripping or folding over.

This piece is my latest exploration of incorporating lace-like cutouts into my vases. The triangle lace pattern is similar the one I’ve used in several of my earlier pieces. I’m continuing the theme of having a brighter color inside the vase that shows through the cutouts.

One of the interesting things in this one is how well the cutouts in the front and back line up at certain angles, making it possible to see all the way through. That creates a neat effect that I wasn’t expecting to be so prominent in this form.

I’ve been playing with variations on the diagonal shift quite a bit recently, including folding a shift from a cone instead of a cylinder (and from an inverted cone). This model is the first time I’ve incorporated that into a vase. Continuing with the theme from several of my recent vases, the painted lines are deliberately aligned to look like curved shapes on the finished model, instead of flat planes. I’m hoping to keep exploring in this direction and turn this into a series.