Origami For Kids

At last! my little book is now seeing the light of day. Equally parts coffee-table art book, and hands-on, get your fingers twitching model and sculpture-making guide, there's a text, and there's a DVD, covering three of the four main branches of origami that I've been exploring in recent years: FACES ANIMALS CURVES I didn't want this to be just an “instructional manual” (= origami diagrams book) but even so instruction, that is, constructing-guiding-demonstrating-suggesting-directing-cajoling-provoking-leadingbyexample (with lots of hand movements) is very much the essence of this book, because it's very much the essence of origami. So there are diagrams & step-by-step guides in both book and DVD, and there is some fancy talk, but the sculpture images are what's really meant to linger in your mind. I give away probably the two most important secrets for how I make my faces. The DVD shows both basic concepts and one complete project for making a head. The ...

I have the honor of announcing, on behalf of the Japan Museum SieboldHuis , that an exhibition of origami art by Akira Yoshizawa will be held in Leiden, the Netherlands, from April 30 to May 29, 2011. Titled “ Animal Parade . Origami by Akira Yoshizawa ”, the focus will be on animals—as they have that special quality of 'liveliness' that the 'Father of Modern Origami' was noted for. There will be over 200 sculptures in various postures and groupings, from periods spanning the Master's career. These "range from gorillas and seahorses to a dinosaur and a horse of exceptional height", as per the exhibition website which is now up. Lectures and hands-on workshops by origami luminaries (as well as by Yours Truly) are scheduled for the weekend of May 7-8 . This will be the largest-scale showing of Akira Yoshizawa's pioneering work in any setting outside of Japan, since the 1950s. The last such museum exhibit at this scale in the West was also the first one:...

Added 14 March, 2012. All of you thousands of sudden visitors to my site, who came here today via the "Google doodle" or by Google-imaging "Akira Yoshizawa"---I am immensely flattered, but am just a humble student of the late great master. If you like this "Head", you might like to know that the sculpture was shown during a talk at the fabulous Yoshizawa animal origami exhibit at the SieboldHuis JapanMuseum in Leiden, the Netherlands, last year, where I was invited to speak. A few Yoshizawa images from that exhibit may be viewed here . (It's what you came for after all... ) Poke around my blog if you want to see what modern paperfolding art looks like---at least my modern paperfolding art. Your appreciation of origami, warms the heart. --Saadya ---------------- ORIGINAL POST (January 2011) Head , by Saadya Made for Jaron Borensztajn of Amsterdam, collector and grandson of Felix Tikotin, the great Japanese Art collector and dealer who...

Last week I had a communication out of the blue from Stephan Weber , first by email then by Skype. Stephan had recently gone back to doing human heads (“masks”) and must have been pointed to my site, where he found a lot of similarity of intent with what I've been doing. I first encountered Weber at “Masters of Origami” in Salzburg, 2005, a show put together by the Red Bull corporation. That was a landmark exhibit, full of first-rate origami some of which was also high art indeed—but Stephan's pair of giant, almost snorting red bulls, struck me as that exhibition's focal point. Immense, vigorous, detailed, absolute icons of latent power, I could not take my eyes off them. Stephan tells me he was tasked by Red Bull to make them about a week before the show opened, and complied. Stephan divides his time between Germany (was it Cologne?) and Patagonia, Chile. What he does in Chile I don't know, except that he likes to go fishing and is rebuilding after a hostel he owned wa...

In origami it is the smooth surface and clean initial shape that I love, out of which erupts 3D form and line and texture, catching the eye at every instant. This eruption out of purity and simplicity, and the retention of it for as long as possible, or the transformation of it into other, reduced forms as the development progresses, is what I like in the work of the best origami designers, those few who know the true cost of complexity. But it is a characteristic also of some of the most beautiful shapes in nature, those of many birds, for example; or flowers, which retain an innocence or a cleanness of line even as their parts differentiate and complexify and turn into the sophisticated instruments of attraction that they must necessarily be. So it is with special interest that I am following the career of one particular designer—not of origami, but of haute couture —whose work has some of this very innocence and sophistication of the floral bloom, its fragility and its might, its or...

It's not entirely impossible as a goal, as these experiments show. But how far can this be taken? ============================== Posting these before I ruin her face from overwork, as I surely will. You can still see the smoothness of the paper I am trying to preserve. --S. ======================= Added Nov. 17. Here she is at a later stage. And finished:

Wet-folded from an uncut rectangle of Canson paper. In recent years most of my face-work has been from foil-backed paper (and in the 1980s it was from pure foil), but I've always wanted to see which of the techniques work also with pure paper. I'm slowly learning how to wet-fold, so here are some preliminary results. S.