Podium

I decided to stick with the Olympic theme for my next design when I was wondering what to fold next. I had been thinking before of making a podium from the center of the paper, but hadn't figured out how yet. I didn't really expect it to be as hard as it was. I based my model on Shonen's method of making 3D shapes. However, I couldn't simply make 3 blocks for the podium, so I added some of my own ideas. I started with a 16:16 grid and used the middle 4 squares as the top square of the highest podium. I decided that the middle would be the height of a cube, the left one would be 2/3rds that height and the right would be 1/3 the height. I then made a square 1/3 to the left of the middle square and another 2/3rds to the right. I used Shonen's building block fold to put them at the heights and folded them back out halfway to keep the outer faces. Then I simply finished the model with some more building block folds on the corners. All of that led to this:


If that isn't enough description, Here is a CP. It took me a while to figure it out, but I finally have it.

For the Olympics

Lately, I had the idea of folding one or more things from the Beijing 2008 Olympics. I decided to start off with what had all the popularity lately, swimming (seeing as Michael Phelps has been winning all those golds, he is up to 7 as of now). I started off planning on making a design inside a square so that the model features the swimmer and the pool. However, after folding it, I realized that there was no color change possible for the swimmer, unless all of the side were folded in, making the model need a huge piece of paper. I was thinking that maybe I could get away with a little non-purism and adding a flesh colored square to the center for the swimmer. However, I remembered Bernie Peyton's Swimming Polar Bear which gave me the idea for my current model. I made the model from a full 16:16 grid rather than a grid inside of the square, and made the excess paper into the water behind the swimmer. Here is my CP:


The trick is to use the same color background as the water side of the paper. Because I used tissue foil, I put a sheet of tissue paper on top of a sheet of foil as the background. The bottom points on the CP make the face, and the two others are the arms. The top edge is folded over to make a color change.

The Cutest

By that title, I don't mean to say that my kitten is going to win the Cute challenge on the english forum, I'm just saying that I think kittens are cute. I've seen hundreds of kittens over the years. I decided that I should try folding a cat again, seeing as the last one didn't end up so well, and then just made a large head to make a kitten. I'm quite happy with the result, and hope to experiment a bit more with the model until I get four good legs. Here is the CP: Even the finished base looks cute, although it looks more like a mouse with a short tail. With a few folds on the face, and a bit of tweaking to the ears and legs, it should end up looking like a little kitten, something like this:

A... Tessellation?

Yes, I finally dove (dived?) into the strange world of tessellations. I decided to have another go at folding a puff star, and this time I was much more successful than the last, and I started folding a whole bunch of puff star variations by adding closed sinks. Finally, I got bored of that and decided to try making my own unit. I started with the hexagon twist, made three open sinks, three closed sinks, and a squash to form a smaller hexagon. Then I repeated the whole thing again, and finally folded the sides of the third hexagon towards the center radially. This resulted in the following tessellation.


I decided to name this the Starflower Unit, because no only does it resemble a star and a flower, but also a tiny white starflower.
I don't think I'll be doing much more in the way of tessellations, mainly because I don't have nearly enough large pieces of paper. However, I hope to be able to use tessellations as textures on realistic pieces in the future.

Jellyfish

Last month, I visited an aquarium. Seeing as this month's challenge on the french origami forum is Postcards from your Summer Vacation, I decided to stick with something simple. This lead me to fold a jellyfish like the ones in the aquarium. Here is the (somewhat incorrect) CP that I used: I didn't put in all the lines, but you can see that the middle point (after the 11.25° lines are collapsed) is squashed into an imperfect octagon. Then the many points become tentacles.