Reality vs. fun and creativity

[TheRealChris]

I had folded a yellow elephant with green spots on it, and placed it right in the middle of my living room table, just to check out, what the reactions might be. Most of the people said first: "elephants aren't yellow" and second "elephants have no spots". Only the third sentence was "nice elephant" or sentences like that, and because of that, we started a discussion, if folded animals should have the colours of their living originals. I have fun folding with bright colours and have no problems with green giraffes and blue monkeys. So my question to you is now:

Do you like folding with un-natural coloured paper and make flower-textured horses and green-blue striped pigs, or do you always try to be as near to the original as possible?


Bright and colourful greetings

- Christian

[stuckie27]

[img]http://www.themountainfold.com/paul/boo ... iraffe.jpg[/img]

I have folded a green Giraffe, I tend to fold the animals out to their true colors though.

[Joe the white]

Just yesterday morning I folded Robert Lang's African Elephant out of some pink copy paper and gave it to my teacher. I like to mess with mother nature occasionally, like reverse zebras or something like that. When I do an exibit I fold them with natural colors, unless there is a pun intended.

[bshuval]

One time, I found out I had a stack of polka-dotted paper. I wanted to use that as origami paper here is scarce... So, I folded many things out of polka-dotted paper at the time. I was in a geometrical folding phase, and had just received Montroll's polyhedra book. So, I folded lots of polyhedra, and they came out great.

However, later I wanted to fold a few animals. I folded Lang's (or was it Weiss's?) turtle form Origami Zoo in Green paper with white dots. It came out quite nice. Then, I decided to fold a Montroll Rhino, from pink paper with white dots. You could not tell it was a rhino at all!!!

As someone once (= this saturday, where this same discussion incidentally came up in an origami meeting) told me: there are folds that rely on the fact that the paper has a single color. Sometimes, the creases and layers of the paper are used to show and suggest features. Using wildly patterned paper causes this effect to disappear. Thus, many folds will simply not work from patterned paper.

In any case, I like using strange one-colored papers for many models. I recently folded a blue Komatsu fox, a pink Komatsu cat, and an orange Budai dragon.

[TheRealChris]

thanks guys, that's so interesting to read
maybe that's the creativity that lives in us.


Christian

[Walden]

I believe that a good deal of the art and creativity that goes into the folding of an origami design is the paper choice.

I tend to go for, if not natural, at least colors that people expect of a particular object, for a very simple reason. A few years ago, my sister and I had a Christmas tree, and I decorated it with origami, including Toshie's Rose Brooch (Sy Chen's).

I used normal kami, or that is to say, origami paper that was in plain colors (blue, orange, etc.) on one side and white on the other, and my sister took them for "fancy stars."

After that, I started folding them from papers that were colors that people would expect of roses, or else gold and silver, and they were then always instantly recognized for roses.

This same principle applies to so much of what I fold. But, I think that polka dotted elephants are still on the same principle: it conveys a message. Just as if I wanted to convey rosiness by using red or pink paper, a polke dotted paper, used for an elephant, might convey whimsy in a way that could never be conveyed with grey paper.

I've personally folded both white and pink elephants over the past week.

[elf]

I've always liked the old standby of folding a bird from old sheet music; it's the best way to make a "song bird." I like the pun-ishment!

Otherwise, I use whatever's handy (in most cases); and I only look for something special when I'm folding something for a gift (animal print paper for animals, scented papers for roses, etc.).

[Jen]

I have some roses I've done out of plain copy paper and then paintd with acrylic paints. I like to have a bit of fun with the colors! You can see some of them in my photo album.

http://ca.f2.pg.photos.yahoo.com/ph/pra ... /my_photos

[bshuval]

When I choose a color for a model, I do not choose it to convey a message.
Sometimes I have a lot of paper of a certain color and I just use that.

Also, my philosophy of origami is that the best thing in paper-folding (other than sharing it, of course), is the folding process itself... And that is not concerned much with the paper color.

[dani luddington]

ok guys and gals. wanna start a thread on patterned papers and the puns we can get from them. i posted to the O-list about scrapbooking papers and origami. a woman posted back with what she liked to use the scrapbooking papers for. she liked creating boxes and made a box that had paper covered in pizza hence the pizza box was created. i recently made a sculpture of something with paper having watch faces on it and called it a time piece. i know groan! have fun and run with it! isnt that the point of origami to have fun!!!
sincerely, dani

[wolf]

Search through the O-list archives, there's a few gems there, like:

- Song bird (sheet music folded into a bird)
- Paper tiger (self explanatory)

[Brimstone]

I usually pick un-natural colors for my models (I think they are more fun) and my wife always complains saying "bats are not pink" or some thing like that

[origami_8]

I haven´t ever thought much about the colour of the paper I am using. Sometimes I like to fold something in a special colour (like a yellow-blue Giraffe), but most of the time I only take the first sheet of paper I can get into my fingers (that´s mostly unicoloured paper), so I fold red turtles or blue roses as well.

[Joseph Wu]

When I design, I don't much care about the colour of the paper. (I used to pick out the colours of kami that I didn't like when I designed. So much so, that people noticed and started saying things like, "Oh, Joseph's using pink. He must be designing something new.")

When I'm folding a finished piece, great care goes into selecting the right paper (thickness, texture, and colour).