sketch of folded paper with origami crystals & wire
May 16 (one-a-day project).
While looking through my old sketchbooks I found this sketch of unrealized art that I had totally forgotten about. It was of a crystalized rock and featured origami crystals of folded rag paper, speared with wire, and the wires would be somehow playable, a stringed instrument of sorts. Now I just have to learn how to do origami so I’m off to the library – how low-tech of me! But searching for things on the internet tends to be really hit and miss, and only good if you already know what you’re looking for. To get an overview, I prefer old-fashioned books, and managed to find five orgami books at the library, a mix of ‘how-to’ books and ‘inspiration from great artwork’ books.
Since beginner’s origami is created from squares, I trimmed a bunch of el cheapo coloured paper to form square sheets. Starting with instructions from the most basic of the how-to books I worked on ‘BASIC FORM 1’ which consisted of folding a lot until you have a basic pinwheel shape that can be further formed into an unstable ‘vase’ and charming ‘boat’.
It quickly became apparent that some of the fascination of using real origami papers is that they are often different on either side, and the process of folding reveals the different patterns/colours. I grabbed a paper bag, some Xmas paper and a sheet of a newspaper from the recycling, and glued them to my coloured squares with acrylic medium.
I then worked on ‘BASE FORM 2’ origami, and made a small ‘candy holder’ with four compartments that, when turned upside down, becomes the ‘fortuneteller’, something I played with as a kid which made me realize that I must have done some origami before.
Moving onto the more complicated ‘petal’ from a second book which contains collapsed folds and took me some time to figure out. Overall the second book is way too complex for what I need, and is primarily focused on inserting different coloured sheets into one another to make patterns on geometric-shaped boxes.
Looking in the third book at the inspired origami art, I found one artist, Jean Claude Correia, whose work resembles what I would like to do. I see that he has used relatively simple folding techniques which I might be able to manage with just my current skills.
Googled him and found a very interesting art blog: http://thedesignspace.net/art/gallery/main.php/origami/aar.jpg.html