New Work

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.

After spending a long time folding pieces mostly in neutral colors, I decided I needed a little more color in my work. I decided to experiment not just with color contrast but also with texture. The white near the top is color of the unpainted paper, the black is painted a flat color, and the purple is dripped/blended to add texture. It’s challenging to get smooth blending in the acrylics on paper. The paint dries very quickly, so I had to work very quickly to get the colors to actually blend together.

In this piece, I also varied the texture of the model itself, which I tried several years ago in my pleated and corrugated vase and diamond vases. The corrugated folding style in the lower part of the vase adds more interest and dimensionality to the simple vase shape.

This piece is mainly a test of a couple new ideas for now. I’m starting to explore ideas for my next series. This idea could become a series, but I’ve also still got a couple other ideas I’m considering.

 

I recently posted photos in progress of a piece I have been working on, and here is the finished piece. This piece is a return to my Intersections series from last year, and the form is adapted from my three-part vase. For more on this piece, see my recent post.

Since I’m currently working on folding a multi-piece model, I decided to post some photos in progress to show how the design and folding process all come together. This piece will essentially be a continuation of my Intersections series from last spring. The design process started in November with a sketch of a possible top view of a model. I sketched quite a few other ideas that day, including a few I’ve already folded and some I’m still planning to fold.

Since I’ve folded quite a few pieces in this series already, I essentially knew from the time I started sketching how I would approach folding these pieces. The one part I needed to double-check was folding the concave 90-degree turn in the middle two pieces. I did a test-fold from a post-it note to make sure I knew how much extra paper I needed to make the turn.

After that, it was time to start actually designing. I made a detailed sketch and worked out all the math so I could cut the paper into the correct size rectangles. If you look closely, you’ll see that I use a combination of inches and centimeters. Perhaps surprisingly, that actually simplifies some of the math compared to just using one set of units. I can calculate most of the dimensions using the same sort of math I explained in my tutorial on designing curved-crease models.

Here are the primary tools I use: a ruler (I actually have five rulers of different lengths and use all of them on a regular basis), a sharp tool for scoring the paper, a cardstock template that I use to score the curved folds (I cut a new template for each model), and a ball of used tape (this is how much tape I’ve gone through since mid-December).

I decided to fold the tallest piece from my design first and started scoring the straight folds and folding along the scored lines.

The base folded exactly how I had planned and how I’ve folded many similar designs.

However, I ran into problems when I got to the top half of the vase. I had forgotten that having the top of the vase flare out would require extra paper, so there wasn’t enough paper there to make things work correctly. Since I added extra creases trying to figure out how to fold the top, there was no way to salvage that piece of paper and turn it into a cleanly folded final piece.

So because I had to start over with the folding, I decided to re-design in such a way that the vase didn’t flare out at the top. The new shape is very reminiscent of one of my first pieces in the series, folded just over a year ago. I tweaked some of the other dimensions as well. For these designs, I have to be careful that the radius never gets smaller than 1/3 of the radius at the widest point and that the radius at the base is at least 1/2 of the largest radius. Otherwise, the folding gets much more complicated.

This time, the folding worked much better. If you look closely, you can see that the piece still has a lot of tape from gluing and wet-folding; I’ll go back and remove that before taking a picture of the final design. There’s also a popsicle stick taped to the top edge to hold it straight while the paper dries.

I’ve also folded the second piece, which has an L-shape. I ran into a few problems here getting all the layers of paper to fit inside correctly near the base, but fortunately I was able to make it work with a few extra folds.

The two pieces fit together nicely. They look better standing with a small gap in between; if I try to put them too close together, the little bulges and curves in the paper become too obvious. Of course, leaving a gap was part of my original sketch. So far, I’m happy with how these pieces have turned out.

I’m working on the third piece now, and hopefully I’ll have time to fold the fourth soon. I’m looking forward to seeing how the finished piece looks!