Origami for All: Elegant Designs from Simple Folds

This book was a joint project between the two of us — Ioana developed 16 simple, elegant models, and I did all the diagramming and book layout work. I’m extremely pleased with how the finished product turned out. We published the book via our own publishing company, Busy Hands Books, and used a wonderful UK printer, Westdale Press in Cardiff, Wales. Printed the right way with offset lithography on high-quality 115gsm cream-colored Munken uncoated paper, with a dark-blue pantone 547U ink – it’s a book that feels lovely in the hands, and is a pleasure to use!

Check out some of the sample pages on the Origami for All website, along with photos of all 16 models contained within the book. My personal favorite is the Bat (although illustrating it was quite a challenge).

I’m very proud of our work on this book, and we are currently traveling around Europe going to origami conventions and bookshops doing events and demonstrations, especially here in the UK. If you are interested in having us come to your school or bookshop to do an origami workshop don’t hesitate to get in touch!

Right now we’re wrapping up our pieces for the event, and working hard to finish the layout for Ioana’s upcoming new book – “Origami for All: Elegant Designs from Simple Folds“. We have a busy schedule of origami convention appearances in May and several teaching events in June and July, so the next few months will involve a lot of travel around Europe for art and origami-related workshops and events. Phew!

Hope to see some of our French paper friends in Yerres in two weeks time!

Eric Gjerde

Hello All,

Here are some newly created diagrams for perhaps my only “easy” origami model, a simple fan made from an A4-sized sheet of paper. I’m quite fond of this little fan, it uses a unique method of radial pleating to create a very useable result!

As with all of my diagrams, these are released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 3.0 License, which allows you to share them and re-use them with appropriate attribution and sharing. (Find out more on Creative Commons licenses)

Download the PDF diagrams here, and feel free to share them with others!

Additionally, if you want to take this model up a notch in style and complexity, divide the paper into 16ths instead of 8ths, and it will make a more pleasing curved fan and a skinnier handle as well. For more advanced folders only!

I hope you enjoy this model as much as I do.

Eric

From her website:

• Seeing as Valentine’s day is just around the corner, I can’t think of a better time to share my simple heart origami model with you. It should be rather easy to fold even if you have no paperfolding experience. Just take your time and follow the diagrams carefully.The simple heart is one of the models that will be included in my upcoming origami book, which should be available for purchase in the next few months. Please feel free to send me your comments. You can find out more information about the book on its website: www.origamiforall.com.

   
  Happy Valentine’s Day!

  Download: Ioana Stoian – Simple Heart PDF

  

• Hi,well, nobody necessarily likes pre-creasing grids, including me. So you’re not alone there. However, I think it’s important to think of it more as a meditative process, and instead of as a chore; it’s a task which you must do to fold a model, and it is, to some extent, an integral part of the model, so it’s worth taking the time to do it well and not rush through it to “get it out of the way”.As others have mentioned to you, if things are getting too small, you need to use larger paper. Also, and perhaps equally as relevant, you should be using better paper… higher quality paper will yield much better results from the same folding process, and is much more likely to give you a better looking result while also giving you less headache while folding. I highly recommend stronger natural papers made from fibers like mulberry or abaca, they work well; or commercial papers like elephant hide. (Japanese/Thai/etc “washi” paper is usually from some kind of mulberry fiber and are pretty inexpensive.)

  As far as precreasing goes, my personal method is the following:

  • * fold the paper in half
  • * reverse the fold
  • * fold each section in half, to the center (like this: VV)
  • * reverse each new fold
  • * fold each new section in half again (like this: VVVV)
  • * reverse each new fold
  • * repeat, repeat, repeat until finished

  Typically I will do one direction until 1/8ths, then the others, just because the paper will deform if you fold all of 1/32 or 1/64 in one direction and not any others. It’s good to spread the folding around, so I’ll usually fold to 1/8, all the other directions, then continue to 1/16, then the same for the other directions, then to 1/32 etc.

  Reversing the folds is important, as it gives a neutral fold orientation to each crease, and makes it infinitely easier to collapse the model later when doing the final folding. You certainly don’t have to do this, but not doing it often leads to big headaches, and it’s something I really recommend to do. It’s more important also with stronger paper which retains more “fold memory” and crease orientation; if you’re using flimsy cheap origami paper, then it’s not as important because too much folding will destroy your paper. (to put it in context, a strong sheet of washi can withstand thousands of back-and-forth foldings and creasings along the same line before it starts to separate, whereas a wood-pulp sheet of origami paper will only last about 4 times when I fold it…)

  Also, doing the “dividing in half” routine rather than accordion-folding, zig zagging, fold-overs, etc is good, because the dividing routine reduces errors in your folding by dividing them into lesser errors, whereas the other folding methods magnify the errors with each continued fold- so your edge creases will really look horrible, things won’t match up, and so on. Mathematically speaking it’s much, much better to divide the paper as you go along. I stress this in all my classes as I feel it’s quite important.

  I am a slow folder, so I don’t make grids very quickly; a 1m x 70cm sheet of elephant hide takes me several hours to get to a 32-division triangular grid. dividing that further into 64 takes the same amount of time again, as it’s the same number of creases to be made! bear that in mind, the step between 32 and 64 is a doubling I always seem to forget this fact.

  To fold a small sheet of paper though, like an A4 sheet (or american letter size paper) into 32 triangular divisions… I think probably an hour? I don’t really measure time while folding, I try to sort of trance out and get into the rhythm of folding and not think about anything. I find it very enjoyable this way.

  Recently I had to fold a lot of grids, making a big piece- I divided 42 one meter sheets into squares about 1cm in size. it took me literally a month to do this, and my hands hated it! many thousands of pleats. I find that I like to work at larger scales, as they are more interesting visually; I can’t really fold pleats any smaller than about 5mm in size, below that the paper just turns to mush. I prefer to fold paper when it’s got some springiness left in it, don’t you? So I prefer to have pleats about 1cm or so, given a choice. This requires larger paper but as stated above I prefer this anyway. I used to fold on the bus, and that required working with 15cm/6inch paper, and that was fine for starting out but very very limiting as time went on. Help yourself out and use bigger paper, it will save you a lot of frustration!

  linked below are two videos of me pre-creasing a square grid and a triangular grid, if you’d like to see the technique I use (bear in mind these are thicker papers, so they required a lot more force than is normally needed.)

  Hopefully there’s some information in here that you will find useful or at least informative! Best of luck and happy folding!

I’ve also created this PDF document to better explain how to fold these grids, and my personal methods for achieving best results.

How-To: Best Methods for Precreasing Square Grids

I also included links to the following two YouTube videos of mine, showing some pre-creasing videos (speeded up, of course:)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q3ddAYOdUrQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y05JUFZ0CMM

Hopefully all of this will help those of you looking for some more information about pre-creasing techniques!

-Eric

Eric posing in front of work, exhausted but happy!

My partner Ioana Stoian and I were invited as guests of honor for the Salon Résonance in Strasbourg, France last month. One of the requirements of our participation was the creation of a large installation piece, sized for a space about four meters by four meters (or about 150 square feet).

We created an extremely large work, based on my Dragon Helix pattern, using elephant hide sheets cut in to strips and then glued together to achieve a 42 meter long sheet of paper. By my calculations there are over 19,000 folds, 2.86km of creases, and about a month’s worth of actual time folding. It took from June 2012 until October 2012 to fold this thing; I had to stop folding at times because the paper was so rough on my hands that it hurt too much to keep folding. I believe this is one of the largest and most complex origami pieces ever made.

There were over 16,000 visitors during the four days of the art salon, and it seemed like every one of them stopped to look at our piece and then come ask us questions about it. We found ourselves repeating the answers to people in our sleep: “Yes, we folded it, Yes, it’s made from paper, No, we didn’t use any machines or tools, Yes, it’s origami…”

The work is now in storage, but we are actively looking for opportunities to exhibit it elsewhere. I very much enjoyed creating a large-scale piece, and I’m focusing on larger installation work going forward. It’s so rewarding to see the reactions on people’s faces when you make something so large and overwhelming.

The wonderful black and white photos at the end of the photo gallery on this post were taken by our friend Peak, who is a Strasbourg-based photographer from Los Angeles. She was shooting B&W film that day and happened to visit us, and we’re so happy she did!

(for those of you viewing this via email, if you’d like to see the gallery images in full size please visit the website to view them- it’s at http://www.origamitessellations.com/2012/12/giant-installation-piece/.)

-Eric

Reveal

Reveal, a new work, framed and mounted in a shadowbox.

Made from handmade flax and abaca paper created by my partner, Ioana Stoian.

As this paper was so vibrant and alive, I aimed for a simple pattern that helped to reveal some of the inner beauty of the paper without stealing attention from the paper itself.

The paper was repeatedly dyed in natural indigo dye, and has an extremely organic nature to it. I’m very pleased with this work.

I recently worked with Knopf Books to supply cover art for two new reprints of classics by Jorge Luis Borges:

Ficciones (Vintage Espanol) (Spanish Edition)

Historia Universal de la infamia (Vintage Espanol) (Spanish Edition)

It was a lot of fun working on these projects; I’ve been doing a fair amount of image work with book publishers lately. I look forward to more opportunities like this!

I’m particularly fascinated by the sounds of all the paper crinkling and creasing at high speed, it’s an odd sound and very interesting.

I am participating as one of the artists in the Holland Paper Biennale 2012, at the Museum Rijswijk in the Hague, Netherlands. It opens September 4th and runs until November 25th.

I’m very excited to be a part of this exhibition; it’s my first show that’s focused on paper arts at large, and not specifically origami. I’m particularly interested to see what papermakers and paper artists think about my bio-paper. It represents quite a bit of research and work, and I hope they find it as fascinating as I do!

From the press release for the Paper Biennale:

Origami works with sculptural eloquence in two individual styles. (…) A background in technology and a passion for paper are united in the geometrically folded creations of Eric Gjerde. In his most recent work he experiments with paper produced by bacteria.

I will be at the opening September 1st, at the Museum Meermanno, and again at the opening on the 2nd, at the Museum Rijswijk. I look forward to meeting paper artists and friends there! I’m sure it will be a wonderful experience.

See the photo gallery attached to this post to view some of the works I’ve sent in for the exhibition.