New Work

This piece is another variation of my new diagonal shift series. Like my last downhill diagonal shift design, this piece is a combination of my normal diagonal shift with my recent crimp-bends. The difference is that this piece includes only one bend above the diagonal shift; this creates a difference in angles between the top and bottom halves of the vase.

This vase uses my recent downhill diagonal shift. The design is quite a bit like my original diagonal shift series, but with some new engineering and a new color scheme. I’m enjoying working with more color, but the brighter colors are also more challenging to work with than the metallic paints I used in my earlier diagonal shift pieces. The paint starts soaking into the paper so quickly that it’s challenging to fix any mistakes or tweak colors without adding a darker second layer. But I like the brighter colors and being able to explore interesting color combinations.

This vase uses my recently developed bends to create a zig-zag bend somewhat reminiscent of my diagonal shift series. I like taking simple, elegant vase and bowl forms and adding surprising elements that look almost impossible to create from a single uncut rectangle of paper. Unlike most of my diagonal shift pieces, I decided to align the painted sections across the bend in this piece.

As usual, I painted the paper before folding this model, and I was able to align the painted sections within about 1 mm. That’s pretty good alignment for how far apart the three painted sections are on the full sheet of paper. Each of the two bends hides quite a bit of paper inside the model. The 90-degree bends are a bit harder to fold than the smaller-angle bends I’ve tried before, but they still require a lot less fighting with the paper than the diagonal shifts do.

Last week I posted photos of some test folds of simple bent tubes. This design uses a series of eight bends to create a helix. I usually base my models on 16-sided tubes, but here I simplified to just 8 sides. Since the bends are all at different angles relative to the tube, the paper curves in three dimensions to approximate a helix instead of a flat doughnut. It’s interesting that a design like this with only straight folds can fold into such a curved-looking shape.

I’ve been working recently on pieces that combine origami and ceramics, and this set is a continuation of that exploration. For all three pieces, the bottom half is ceramic, and the top half is origami. These pieces are inspired by my diagonal shift series that was fully paper-based. For those pieces, the crease pattern I used only allowed the top half of the paper to shift “uphill” like the rightmost piece, but by combining media I was able to explore a wider range of possibilities.

I planned the angle of the diagonal plane so the uphill and downhill pieces would be shifted by similar distances from the center. Since all of these pieces are made very differently, I took pictures to show how all of these work:

The middle piece, where the origami and ceramic parts are aligned, is probably the most straightforward. I used a sine wave to find the correct diagonal plane to align with the ceramic piece, then folded the paper in a bit so the lower part would sit inside the ceramic piece.

The uphill shift piece is folded in essentially the same way as my other diagonal shift pieces. Like the aligned piece, the bottom part of the paper model sits inside the ceramic piece.

The downhill shift piece is the most different from what I’ve done before and the one that I don’t know how to fold cleanly from one piece of paper. The paper piece has a flat diagonal plane on the bottom similar to my previous diagonal shift pieces and a short “stem” that sits into the ceramic base. Because of the relative paper lengths, the stem is shifted toward the blue edge of the paper. But since the hole in the ceramic base is all the way at the lower edge, I can still get an overall downhill shift.

As I’ve done the past several years, I designed a Christmas ornament this year. This ornament has a similar overall shape as my first ornament, with a band of diamonds similar to something I used in one of my earliest designs. On a narrower model, the diamonds are a lot more inset, which gives a different feel to the model.

As usual, this model is folded from Elephant Hide paper, painted with red and metallic acrylic paints.

This piece is a continuation of my exploration of pieces that combine origami and ceramics, and the first to branch away from shapes I had already created in paper. I made the ceramic piece on the wheel, then hand-built the asymmetric wavy edge onto it. The ceramic piece also has a bit of an internal ledge for the origami piece to rest on. The top origami piece is folded from a circle of paper. I placed the knob a little ways from the center of the circle so I could use the extra paper on one side for the matching wavy edge. The folding approach is pretty similar to one I’ve used before.

I like how this piece let me do something by combining media that would have been much more challenging with paper alone. It would be much harder to make a flat surface for the top piece to rest on in an origami base. The wave on the ceramic piece also hides that the bottom edge of the origami piece is raised on one side. I’m working on finding more ways of combining the two media that take advantage of the differences between paper and clay.

This piece is a continuation of my exploring pieces that combine origami and ceramics. The shape is very similar to one of my earlier Intersection pieces. This is folded from Lizard Hide paper, and so far I’m very happy with how the paper folds. The colors didn’t photograph particularly well because of the difference in shine between the glaze and the paper, but the blue and the green go together better in real life.

Starting this summer, I’ve had the opportunity to spend some time working in a ceramics studio and start working on a series of pieces that incorporate both origami and ceramic parts. This is the first of that series from when I was first starting to re-learn how to use clay after a six-year hiatus, and I should be finishing some more similar pieces in the coming weeks. Since I made two halves of the clay piece, I also made two origami pieces:

The process for creating the combined pieces is a bit more complicated that just designing an origami piece. I started by making a round ceramic piece on the wheel, then cut it in half and added the flat planes once it was dry enough to hold its shape. Unlike in origami, it’s tough to plan the exact size of a ceramic piece because the clay shrinks during the drying and firing process, so I didn’t start the origami part until the ceramics were completely finished. That way, I could make sure the sizes of the two pieces matched up correctly.

The origami is folded from grainy paper, another of the new papers I’m trying out. I like the weight and foldability of this paper a lot. The wet-folding will take some adjustment, but I’m definitely interested in testing how this paper works for more complicated models.

I bought some new types of paper from Brian Webb at the Centerfold convention in Columbus about a month ago, and this is the first one I’ve gotten to try. This model is folded from Bear Hide paper, but the color reminded me of stained wood (hence the name of this piece).

This was an interesting paper to try out, but it’s one I would only use again for simpler and more geometric models than this. The middle segment folded very nicely, but I had more trouble with the more subtle curves. It was a bit hard to wet-fold this paper, especially since my usual method of taping things in place tended to tear the top layer off the paper. But it’s nice to have a different selection of colors and learn how different papers behave.