New Work

I have designed a couple luminaries before (several years ago), but this time I decided to put the design on the inside. I started with plain white Elephant Hide paper and painted one side a mottled green/blue. Then, I drew the black pattern on the same side of the paper with a marker. Since the painted side is on the inside, the design only appears when the luminary is lit from the inside.

Here are a couple more views of the bottom of the piece to show how this works:

This is my Christmas design for this year, a variation on my ornament designs from the past two years. This year, I decided to record a video of the folding process. The video starts right after I finished scoring the creases (you can see the rulers and scoring tool on the desk). I start by pre-creasing along the scored (straight and curved) lines. I then glue the paper into a tube and collapse the form in stages, starting from the middle. I used a combination of tape and rubber bands to hold the form in shape. At the very end, I take the tape and rubber bands off an ornament I had folded earlier to reveal the final shape.

I was recently commissioned to fold a smaller version of my recent large Green Vase. I kept the same painted pattern, but I used a little yellower green, which is more the color I originally wanted.

It’s fun seeing the two pieces together! Even though the smaller piece is almost 10 inches tall, it looks very little and cute next to the larger piece.

Over the past several weeks, I’ve been folding stars, fractals, and tessellations for fun. I bought some pretty papers several years ago that are too thin for my normal style of folding, but I finally used them for some models that don’t require as sturdy of paper. None of these designs are original – they include Chris Palmer’s Flower Tower, Evan Zodl’s EZ Star, Dasa Severova’s Star Mathilda, tessellations from Eric Gjerde’s book, and a few others. These models are on the wall in my room now, and they help fill up some space that has been empty for quite a while.

I recently posted the first two pieces from my new large series that I folded over the summer. Here are the final two pieces from the large series for my show at Furman:

The turquoise vase is the tallest piece of the series by a bit, at about 22 inches tall. Folding on such a large scale is a bit more challenging than folding smaller pieces. These pieces are so large that reaching to the bottom required essentially putting my entire arm inside the piece. The folding requires a whole lot more maneuvering of the large paper, and the paper barely fit on my desk.

The purple bowl is actually folded from two long rectangles cut from the same sheet of Elephant Hide. Instead of one 70 x 100 cm sheet, I essentially cut and re-combined to make one 50 x 140 cm sheet (minus a bit of overlap). That let me fold a wider bowl than would be possible from a single uncut sheet.  I like the appearance of the having the white stripe on top of the black and purple, especially since the paper was originally white.

I’ll be back at Furman next weekend for the reception for my show (October 24, 6:30-8:30 pm) and to take down the show.

This summer, I folded a series of four large-scale pieces in preparation for my show at Furman University. These pieces are each folded from almost an entire sheet of Elephant Hide paper, cut down slightly from the 70 x 100 cm sheet. These two pieces are each around 20 inches (50 cm) tall.

After folding two series in fairly neutral colors, I was very excited to start a new series with much brighter colors. I kept the black and white in these pieces and the diagonal elements to create connections with my recent two series.

As always, I painted the paper before folding it. Painting on such a large scale creates some challenges I hadn’t dealt with in my smaller pieces. I built up several layers of watered-down acrylic paint on each piece to get the value and hue I wanted. Since I knew from past experience that it’s very hard to paint a flat color, I intentionally added a bit of texture to the paint using a brush.

I’ll write more about the folding process for these pieces when I post the final two pieces of the series.

This piece is part of my Diagonal Shift series and is very strongly based on one of the earliest pieces in the series. I used (almost) the same crease pattern but re-designed the painted pattern. The painted pattern is somewhat reminiscent of my Floating Diagonal Shift, where the painted parts would align if the segments of the vase were aligned with each other. I enjoy creating the illusion of impossibility with these pieces.

This piece is a continuation of my Diagonal Shift series, building especially from one of the earlier pieces in the series. When I first tried folding this concept, there wasn’t enough difference between the slopes of the diagonal line and the horizontal line, so the two halves of the vase weren’t clearly separated enough. When I re-designed the form for this piece, I made the diagonal much more dramatic. This creates an illusion that the top half of the vase is balancing on the tip of the bottom half. Of course, as in the other pieces in this series, there is a narrower piece connecting the two halves.

I also played a bit more with the colors in this piece. The copper and the green-gold give more color contrast than I have been using. Also, it’s not obvious from the photo, but the copper areas have a thin layer of copper paint over a layer of gold. The subtle color differences add more interest to the piece.

I’ve folded quite a few pieces in my Diagonal Shift series recently, and this piece is the latest addition to the series. In all of my previous pieces in the series, I’ve either used only one diagonal shift element or used two diagonal shifts in the same plane. In this piece, the two diagonal shifts are rotated 90 degrees from each other, and the painted designs follow the same pattern rotation. Keeping track of the rotation made this piece especially challenging to design, particularly drawing the crease pattern onto the paper.

It’s interesting to see how this piece came out. Since most of the pieces in this series have all their angles in the same plane, there are a few very interesting viewing angles, but the other views don’t add much of anything. But this piece has a more complicated geometry in three dimensions. It’s hard to pick a view to photograph because there isn’t any one angle that shows the full shape (more views below). Seeing the relationships between the shapes from a variety of angles make the piece more interesting to look at in real life.

This piece is a return to my diagonal shift series, which I took a short break from. I used the same diagonal shift variant element as in my most recent two pieces in the series. This time, instead of using two diagonal shifts to transition from a wide cylinder to a narrow one and then back to a wide one, I only used one diagonal shift. The sizes are aligned so the outer edge on one side is an unbroken curve.

One of the challenges I often run into in designing models is figuring out how my sketch will actually look in three dimensions. Since I have to figure out all the dimensions of the model before I do any folding, it’s very important that my sketch has the proportions I want. But in this piece, the change from a 2D sketch to a 3D folded model changed how the proportions look more than I expected. In the sketch, the top and bottom halves looked more evenly balanced; in the model, the bottom half has a good bit more volume and more visual weight. Even if this piece didn’t look quite like I expected, that makes it more of a learning experience for me than folding something that works exactly how I expected.