Origami Tessellations

pentagons and negative starsOriginally uploaded by origami joel.

Wow. Joel took the pentagonal negative space thing and really ran with it! Check out this amazing design he’s working on.

I think the larger pentagon twist in the center (which could fit a star inside it, from a size perspective) might help to lend some larger tessellation-oriented stability to the pattern. It will need some other shapes thrown in, but I think there’s a lot of promise in this. I’m amazed by it already- folding pentagons is hard work! there’s a whole lot of reference creases there that need to be worked out, etc.

Only Joel can get away with calling this “hurriedly designed”, by the way. The rest of us would most likely call it “painstakingly done”.

I’m hoping to see something like this backlit; if he gets a CP for it, I’ll try to get it onto something thin and transparent to see what it looks like.

• Pentagonal Tessellations
  some wonderful pentagonal tessellation tilings. be warned- a lot of bright colors on this page.
  (tags: pentagon pentagonal tessellation tessellations tesselation tesselations tiling geometry art math)

patterned “spread” hex tile fold on Flickr, by Origomi

It was about one year ago today that I started putting photos on Flickr! Thanks so much to all of you who have made it the wonderful experience that it has been. I have met so many interesting and delightful people from all over the world in this last year. I feel very blessed.

Thank you!

-Eric Gjerde

• Flickr Leech
  Andrew Houser is my favorite person for today! He published this awesome tool that allows you to browse huge quantities of flickr images at a shot, by tag, username, interestingness, etc. Great work, Andrew!
  (tags: flickr browse leech thumbnails photos hack flickrhack houser)

Continuing with the ideas of using negative space to form shapes, I tried to fold a traditional 5-pointed star. This required figuring out a few things, and to make life significantly easier for me I created a pretty simple crease pattern to use. However, a lot of the fold relationships with pentagons aren’t as easy to work out, and things don’t fold out to be easy distances like 1:2; with pentagons, they are primarily 1:1.6…, or 1/phi. I love the number Phi, and it’s really a fantastic thing, but folding it isn’t as easy! I’m sharing this example just to show it’s certainly possible, and hopefully to spur some other people on to see what they can do with the same sorts of ideas.

Here’s some photos of what I was working on; the backlit image has one corner which is folded differently, to illustrate the same kind of concept I used on my 6 sided stars. figuring out where to put all the creases was pretty tricky, although if I was doing it again it would be simpler. It’s definitely all about reference creases and lines.

And here’s the crease pattern I was using- it’s really more of a reference line sheet, than anything else. But it’s available to download if you’re interested.