Origami obsession rekindled

I blame it all on this post from Design*sponge. If I didn't recently subscribe to it, my origami obsession would have stayed dormant for who knows how long. But it's been rekindled as it were. And I spent a weekend building many a icosahedron of various sizes.

Let's get back to the inspiration. I am in absolute awe of what Fracisca Prieto has done with somewhat simple modular origami forms. If you are at all interested, please go take a look in the graphic art section with particular attention to her Shakespeare, Between folds/envelopes, The Antibook and the anti-poster projects. I totally dig the obsessive collecting of envelopes to create a larger composition. I'm all over the taking an old found book and reworking it. But what really sparked my interest to start off was her antibook/antiposter projects. I just HAD to make me one of those crazy icosahedrons.

After searching You Tube during lunch at work I found this tutorial.


Once I got home from work, I busted out my Muji origami papers and got to work. The Muji squares are about 6 in. so the the pieces for making each of the interlocking units are 3 x 6 in. This makes an icosahedron that measures about 5.5 in. across.

I was pretty good at getting one of each colour on every side. There's one side that has double red and another that has double green. I figure it's not too bad for a first time making this shape.

But of course I wasn't satisfied with just having one icosahedron. I HAD to make another one. A bigger one! The biggest size paper I have is 11 x 17 in. so I took 11 in. sqaures, divided them in half and went to work. Here's the resulting ginorma-icosahedron. It measures about 10.25 in. across.

You're probably wondering about the colouring. Well Francisca's antibook and antiposter add printing to the blanks to make this shape. So I started to analyse the shape itself. There's numbers on each facet (3 facets make up each face). There's one facet of each colour on every face. As you can see I started to match up the facets of the same colour for each point created and alternated the neighboring points, but this doesn't quite work out with 3 colours. One colour for the central point, and two alternating colours doesn't work out because there's 5 neighboring points. I might redo this model with more colours. Like one colour per point.

You can also see my hairy marks at the intersection of facets marking the number of sides. All this analysis is so I can figure out how the pieces relate to each other. Necessary information if like Francisca, I want to map some artwork onto this shape.

I also have visions of making a room sized version that people can go inside and maybe even make it move around like a giant hamster ball. Wouldn't that be rad?

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