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 …

Ron Resch, curved folds (from Ron Resch) I highly recommend you check out the fledgling website belonging to Ron Resch, a visionary mathematician and designer who was one of (if not *the*) first to explore the architectural potential of 3D tessellated structures in the 1960’s and 70’s. Only lately have I been exposed to more of his work, and the more I see the more I want to know. He has a film- called “The Paper and Stick Film”- which is apparently quite a fascinating thing to watch. He has a link to purchase this from his website, but it still seems to be a non-functioning link. (The minute this becomes available I’m buying it!) It looks like he updated his site with some more photos of his patents and some additional historical photos of things he has worked on, too, so if you’ve been to the site before I suggest visiting it again. Tom Hull talked a good bit about Resch at the Origami USA convention this year, and really intrigued me to look …

Pecten magellanicus, work sketch Originally uploaded by EricGjerde. I’ve been spending way too much time lately exploring pleated, three-dimensional structures. With this little fold, I was wanting to see a 3D shell-like fan shaped piece; it’s not really quite what I was looking for, but it’s also interesting, so I left it as-is with the intention of trying to make another one later. After wetfolding it a bit (to assist with the thick pleats at the center) the shape kind of grew on me. I recently folded a much larger sheet of 4 of these shapes- essentially a tessellation of this design. It is nice, but I wasn’t quite happy with how it turned out- there’s a really complicated bit of magic involved with how the pleats + diagonal creases work out, so even if your rectangles are off by a tiny bit you don’t get the same result. In this design, the ratio of the rectangles is 2:9, for reference, which seems to work the best; the larger example I made is more like …

Yuko Nishimura Ripoff Originally uploaded by Owesen. Fredrik Owesen did some reverse-engineering of the folding techniques mastered by Yuko Nishimura, a long-time favorite of mine. (if you like pleating and tessellations, Nishimura is probably also a favorite of yours, too!) Fredrik gave a little description of how to accomplish this type of folding: I’ll try to write up some sort of how-to, although I suspect they tend to be confusing. I’ve grown pretty lazy in terms of folding methods lately, so this will be based on that. You begin by drawing the crease pattern on the sheet you want to fold, using a sharpish ballpointpen, one without ink or a color matched to the paper is good. First lines divide the sheet in long rectangular lines (1). Turn the sheet, then using some sort of curved guide (found a cheap flexible ruler well suited for the purpose), fill in the curves that go between the lines from the previous step. Use the lines you just drew, both curved and straight, to mark up a grid …

Circus Circus Originally uploaded by lilzabubba. I’m fascinated by the complex geometric patterns involved in this traditional Japanese embroidery craft. It’s all types of tessellations of the sphere, which is utterly different than the flat plane tessellations I work on- so things like pentagons are able to tile without difficulty. I must admit I’m a little envious of how nicely things tile on the surface of a sphere. I think perhaps we are missing some of the intriguing geometric connections that the world is offering us! I’m a big fan of flickr Temari crafter lilzabubba, who seems to make a new one of these every other day. A good mental break from the tyranny of the two dimensional plane of existence.