For quite some time, I had been complaining about lack of origami books about curved crease techniques.  But now we have one!  Curved Origami by Ekaterina Lukasheva has a bunch of curved crease projects from very simple to moderately complex.  This is one of the first models in the book.

For those who don’t know, a “curved crease” is a crease that makes a curved line on the paper.  A curved crease will not fold all the way, meaning that the folded models necessarily make a 3-dimensional shape.  The typical folding method involves drawing and scoring curved lines on paper (possibly with the assistance of templates, compasses, french curves).

I really admire how simple these water drops are.  (Yeah, I know rain drops aren’t actually shaped like that.)

When I travel around, sometimes I bring some origami paper, and I take requests.  It’s a party trick, I just look something simple up and I fold it.  You can find an instructional video for this one here.

This one was for one of my younger relatives.  She was very into wolves.  Why wolves?  Because she liked SssniperWolf, of course!  Sorry, I don’t know who that is, some sort of YouTube celebrity?  She’s obviously named after a character from Metal Gear Solid, so I suppose that means you have Hideo Kojima to thank for this particular photo.  You know, back when I was her age, celebrities confused me, because adults would act like I was ignorant for not recognizing them. I’d say, “Who??” because I literally wasn’t alive for whatever made that person famous.  But it seems kids’ youtube is much more personality-focused than the media I got.

This origami model was part of a pair that I folded at the same time.  I posted a photo of the other one in 2018.  Like the other model, this one also has four distinct colors.  Three of the colors have 5 units each, and the fourth has 10 units.

This is a model from Origami Design Secrets–actually, it’s on the cover of the book.  It is a demonstration of the technique of pattern grafting, where you fold a flat pattern into the paper before going on to fold the general shape.

Robert Lang’s design is well and good, but I have a tendency to work with 15 cm paper at largest.  It’s not ideal for a lot of types of models, but it is my self-imposed constraint.  So, in my version, I made the scales very large relative to the size of the paper.  In Lang’s version, the scales are one quarter the size in both directions, meaning there are 16 times as many scales.  Lang’s version is more realistic, while mine mostly just evokes the idea of scales.

So the funny story was, I was thinking about how I could adjust the model to work with 15 cm paper, and I woke up one night thinking, “Of course!  I should just fold the paper into a 29×29 grid!  Then the proportions can remain the same and all the math works out!”  It turns out that my dream math isn’t very good, and 29×29 makes very little sense.  But it worked out anyway.

You know, I posted a sketch of this same model, but I don’t think I had ever posted a photo of the model itself?  Well, here it is.

As I mentioned before, someone at the origami meetup taught me how to make this.  If I recall correctly, he did not represent himself as the designer, which leaves the designer unknown to me.  I could not find any similar models online.  Nor do I remember quite how to make it.  That said, I could probably reverse engineer it if needed.

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Since I’ve been writing about AI art, I want to talk about the implications on my own artistic medium of choice: origami. Since I do not draw (although I have the ability to make a sketch), I’m not directly impacted by AI.  But there are some distinctive artistic values that emerge from origami, and I think it might help explain where I’m coming from.

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