Origami Tessellations

Living under the Sea

Originally uploaded by EricGjerde.

I read a strange article about “whale fall” yesterday, and part of the discussion involved specialized species that capitalize on such events.

The one that really caught my eye was “bone eating zombie worms”.

So, needless to say, I had bizarre dreams last night about what a bone-eating zombie worm would look like, and this morning while working on some paperfolding I ended up with this purely by accident.

It looks a little friendly, so perhaps it’s a vegetarian zombie worm?

No doubt it has nothing in common with the carnivorous bone-eating variety, but it looked enough like an ocean worm of some sort for my tastes.

What sort of interesting intermediate shapes do you come across while folding? I always like to play with the pleated paper like this before I go on to fold other things with it. Maybe sometimes it’s OK for us to just stop at this point and admire it as-is?

I’m in love with this design.

It’s from REISER+UMEMOTO, an architectural design firm, done for an international competition in the U.A.E. for one of Dubai’s mega-complex plans.

You can navigate through the site (it’s under “projects” and then “Aeon”) or hit the link directly to the project page here.

Wow. I didn’t know that people designed things like this. I’m enthralled.

square_weave_project_5.jpg

Originally uploaded by EricGjerde.

Uses offset square twists in the back to make the open squares in the front.

As mentioned on the flickr page- Where did I first see this? Is it yours? I have seen it many places, but I can’t seem to recall (or find) the first one I ever saw.

If you have folded this, and have a copy online, would you consider posting a link to it in the comments for this blog post? Or if you don’t wish to do that, I’d also be happy to hear from you via email- you can reach me at origomi@mac.com.

-Eric Gjerde

all_6_square_twist_illos.png

Originally uploaded by EricGjerde.

The last in this series. Just sharing the quasi-final product with you, in case you were following along. What do you think?

It needs some arrows and of course it’s missing the instructive text, but then again it’s not for public consumption in this state of completion.

If nothing else, I have picked up a new technique for future personal efforts, and that’s never a bad thing to have.

Square Twist Illustration, v2 (WIP)

Originally uploaded by EricGjerde.

I’ve been working on some illustration techniques, to try to make illustrations for a project I am working on. I am most definitely not an illustrator (a glance at my work will “illustrate” that) but I’m trying to learn a bit; this technique of tracing over an existing image works well, but it becomes very important to capture the right image to use- bad angles, weird shadows, and other things that get in the way will make your traced-over illustration particularly inaccurate.

In this case, I cut’n’pasted the 5 different shots I was working with into a single doc for your viewing (dis)pleasure; this does not represent the layout or anything of that nature, so don’t worry about that. I threw some shadows onto the illustration in the upper right corner to try out a technique for doing that- I’m reasonably pleased with the results, but it needs some tweaking, and some better attention to light source directionality.

Also, it was suggested in the comments on the flickr photo that I add an additional step between (4) and (5), with which I agree. I had thought there was a little bit of a leap there, for the uninitiated, and I received some confirmation on that. Others suggested no need for the shading, which is also possible- would good shading help? I will have to try changing it so the shading helps to directly indicate the paper’s direction, as I’m noticing from the thumbnail that this one is a bit confusing.

But all in all, I am thinking this technique is more clear than photos, at least for showing the basics of tessellation folding. Ultimately, folding complex tessellation pieces requires a lot of attention to detail and understanding the basics, more than anything. So I am thinking that with a stronger emphasis on the basics, less can be said about the complex pieces, in terms of in-depth step-by-step instructions.

Is this wrong thinking on my part? Does everyone need rigorous, fully-illustrated step-by-step instructions for everything, even if it is a tessellation including potentially thousands of separate folds? Because if that’s the case, then any sort of actual folding instruction would be impossible.

I like to think that tessellation folders reach a certain point where they suddenly “get it”, and a light bulb goes off in their mind- they instantly have understanding of how the concept works, and what is required to not only fold the tessellation they are working on, but any other tessellation they might want to create as well.

We’ll see how that theory works out in practice…