I’ve been trying some different ideas with pentagonal tilings as of late, and this is one of the more successful ideas that came out of the exploration.

It reminds me a lot of a pattern made by Melisande: butterfly tessellation (on flickr.)

You can see my attempts to recreate the original pattern using voronoi tessellations here:

which I also mentioned on this blog post a few days ago.

ah- you can also see Melisande’s folded version here:

Anyway, I had shelved the ideas for the time being, as my efforts to obtain the proper tiling using that particular set of angles was proving to be infuriating; things like 105 degree angles just aren’t easy to fold.

So after setting that aside, I came across a mosque tiling from Iran which had a particularly interesting dodecagonal tessellation (more on these later, when I can post more photos & give it the proper writeup it deserves). In an attempt to generate a slightly easier variant of that mosque tiling, I came up with one of the pentagonal shapes you see here- the one that looks wider, more like a crabshell. It was intriguing, and after some playing around I realized it would make the same type of tiling I had been trying to accomplish before.

It’s funny how things like this tie together in unexpected ways, isn’t it? I find that my mind does it’s best thinking when I intentionally stop working on something and put it down for a day or two, while purposefully avoiding thinking about it.

I’ve read that our subconscious brain is really the good decision maker, and that our conscious mind is only good for things like making tea, tying shoes, and other daily tasks. I suppose this might be true when it comes to making odd connections between different artistic sources and inspirations, too.

I still have a hard time thinking of this paperfolding habit/addiction/affliction of mine as art; although it would seem that some people do think of it that way. It’s flattering, but I don’t fold these things for display purposes- it’s more of a way to get the ideas out of my head, into a real physical form, where they can be used by other people or at least just stop bothering me by rattling about inside my thoughts.

Lately I’ve been reading the book “Getting Things Done”, (or GTD for short, if you want to be a cool geek) which has an item at it’s fundamental core of removing ideas from your conscious thought and committing them to paper, as a way of organizing your thinking and your life. I think this is a valuable concept, which I’m hoping I can implement; at least with regards to certain projects in my life which have popped up as of late. Forcing myself to extract origami ideas and write them down gives me the opportunity to peruse them later when the time is right, instead of when I’m halfway through a 3 hour meeting (don’t ask).

Anyhow, just thought I’d share some news with you. Hope your week is going well and your weekend is productive and fun- I have some serious office-cleaning to do, so I can’t say I’m looking forward to it that much!

-Eric