Asking your question about “what should I teach these kids?” there would no doubt result in quite a few very good answers, as there are people on the list who do exactly that sort of thing. I would very highly suggest joining the Origami Mailing List- a great email mailing list that has tons of origami folders of all types and ages (and countries!) on it. This can be very frustrating, especially if your audience isn’t too interested and has a short attention span.
very few people could fold his pattern without quite a few attempts to get it right. One of the issues is that this type of folding (especially Andy’s design above) require a LOT of extreme precision, which takes fine motor skills and lots of practice. I do, however, have a large pile of designs and patterns, as well as quite a few good friends who do similar kinds of folding, so I have no doubt that we will be able to fill the book with a bunch of great designs that will really get people going on this kind of folding. It’s somewhat of an introductory book into tessellations, although more of a project book than a mathematical tome (I don’t expect there to be much of any math inside it, hopefully.) There’s some other folks out there who can, and will, address that aspect of things in a much better fashion than I ever could.
The plan as it stands is a publication date in autumn of 2007. There really aren’t any books out there on this topic (yet), although there are a few in the works, at several different levels.Īs a little bit of self promotion, I’m currently working on a book project with Lark Books (arts/crafts publisher) with the working title of “Creating Origami Tessellations”. I started folding this kind of thing about 2 years ago, starting with some basic geometric folding I saw in a book- and I asked myself, “can I do that with triangles instead?” That lead me down a strange, winding path of self discovery up to the present day. (He’s a very nice and generous guy in person, though!) He’s a little secretive about his work, however- it can be very hard to actually find examples of it online. But from a practical “origami” perspective, they are a good starting point.Ĭurrently, in my opinion, Chris Palmer is the world’s leading origami tessellation artist, by far, and I think probably has furthered the art more than anyone. It started (presumedly) with FUJIMOTO Shuzo and MOMOTANI Yoshiide in Japan, in the 60’s/70’s although there were other people doing similar tessellation work in the US prior to them, as well as more historical precedents that are quite older. No, I am not the originator of this type of origami- just a happy practitioner of it. – two weeks from today, we’re leaving for Brazil! at the end of the month is the Tessellation Expo at the Botanical Gardens in Brasilia if by some odd chance you’re in the area, stop by! or check this website again for a heavy preponderance of photographs, afterwards!) Thanks, Andy, for sharing this great work with us! I highly recommend trying it, especially if you’re not just doing straight grid-based tessellation designs. He’s also right about working with glassine- it really, really helps to see the underlying structures in the designs.
#Octagon tessellation full#
Sometimes having a great visual clue does more than any book full of text can do. I’m really happy to see more designs like this- as I continue to try to better understand higher geometries and how they all come together, seeing wonderful examples like this helps for me to comprehend things in a better way. It’s based directly on a design from Chris Palmer’s website, Shadowfolds. Andy Wilson folded this marvelous octagonal tessellation pattern out of glassine.