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Showing posts from January, 2018

Densely Packed Hexagons and Triangles

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Here's a rather crowded tessellation. Hexagons surrounded by triangles.  The backside make a tight weave pattern. The front is a chaos of triangles and hexes all banging into each other. I tried backlighting it, but it's so dense that no light shone through. It'd probably look prettier with the repetitions spaced more generously to allow some light to come through in the gaps. That may already have been done by someone somewhere. It rings a little familiar. Still the unlit version has its merits. It's kinda fun to play around with the overlays of triangles and hexes. You can get different patterns bases on which shapes are on top/bottom. My paper didn't really want to cooperate. I wanted all the triangles on top. But every time I put some of the triangles on top of the hexes, some of the other hexes popped up on top of the triangles.That might be a problem with my choice of paper. Or it could be the design simply isn't able to do what I envisioned. I wonde

Round Petals Flower Tessellation

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This tessellation was inspired by one of Lydia Diard's designs. Her website has some really amazing tessellations as well as tutorials for some. Just google her name. Hers is a little different from this one, but most of the idea credit goes to her. I just kinda took her design and did it a little bit backward. I really like how the back and the front give such different results when backlit. It's looks like two different tessellations, but it's actually just one. A small hexagon at the center of a 32x32 triangle grid. Then there are rabbit ear triangle sinks to create the star points off of the center. This is more easily visible from the second photo. This central design is simply repeated. It would fit nicer on a 48 fold grid, but my paper was not large enough for that. So the repetitions are only partials. Still.... the one side (first image) backlit comes out looking pretty well finished. Go figure. In the second image it's a little more evident that th

McKeever's Escher Steps Collapse

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I had some paper collapsing fun the other day at work. This John McKeever design was something I'd tried maybe a year ago with limited success. This time around I finally got it right. It really is an insanely difficult crease/collapse pattern. I found it so vexing to transfer to the page that I decided to just print the pattern and then cut out the square from there. Once I did that, it was actually quite enjoyable to collapse. In that frustratingly hard origami kind of enjoyable way. To facilitate the collapse I did all the folds in both directions. So even though the design calls for specific valley and mountain folds, all of mine were genderless. This helped in getting the paper to cooperate. I just used regular printer paper. Nothing special. I find a lot of regular priced origami paper weakens too quickly on tessellations and intricate collapses. The pulpy nature of printer paper helps give it strength for repeated folding. I collapsed the middle according to the