Unlike other forms of visual art, many origami artists will never create a piece without following explicit sets of instructions. In fact, you can become an exceptional origamist without ever designing a single piece yourself. In many ways, origami parallels music, in which great musicians don’t need to be composers, but through their technical mastery and musicality, they can create beauty from the notes on the page. Origamists do the same, combining precise control of the paper with tactfully applied sculpting techniques to create art. The ability to design origami is neither necessary nor sufficient to be a great origamist.
I said that exactly six months ago, just two months into my journey of designing origami. Back then, I compared myself to a composer (not a great composer, just a composer) creating new art for others to interpret. The problem is that, unlike composers, I wasn’t sharing my work in a way that allowed others to replicate it. No one else could fold any of my origami designs because I didn’t share how. In fact, I could barely replicate my own designs because I kept forgetting how I made things. I had no system for notating how I designed my works.
Extending the musician/composer analogy even further, most musicians will likely learn some form of notation, typically in the form of sheet music, which displays pitches and rhythms sequentially, sometimes with notation for dynamics, tempo, and articulation. Composers, being musicians themselves, also learn this notation and write their scores this way, allowing others to replicate it. Origamists also learn a type of sequential notation called Yoshizawa-Randlett diagrams. Yoshizawa-Randlett diagrams display folds sequentially with notation for direction, references, and previous creases. Since designers are also origamists, they should notate their work using diagrams too, right?
Not necessarily. While most origami can be notated sequentially, designers have another option. While the processes of playing music and folding paper are both sequential, in origami, the final product is not consumed sequentially. Rather than watching the folding process, viewers admire the finished piece as a whole. Since origamists are just trying to reach some end state, in theory, designers only need to notate that end state. You can do this by taking your origami, unfolding it, and then drawing on a separate sheet of paper where all the folds go. Then, if you were to copy all the folds you drew out onto a new piece of paper, you could refold your design.
These drawing-a-picture-of-every-single-fold notations are called crease patterns. It should be noted that trying to fold origami from crease patterns is incredibly difficult to do, even for the simplest crease patterns. First used by Neal Elias and contemporaries, crease patterns allowed prolific designers to remember all their designs without necessarily recording every fold. Folding your own crease patterns is much easier than folding other people’s crease patterns because you know exactly what you meant to do at every intersection. Eventually, origamists began attempting to fold others’ models from their crease patterns. This became known as “solving” crease patterns because the process is essentially a very complicated origami puzzle. It’s still not extremely common, but in some communities of skilled folders, solving crease patterns is second nature.
The reason I am sharing all of this with you is that I’ve finally started drawing crease patterns for my origami. I’ve created a digital gallery here with photos and crease patterns for a few of my designs. I have so much respect for artists that diagram every step of their work, but I just can’t be bothered to do all that drawing, but I still want others to be able to fold my work, so this is what I came up with. I likely won’t have any more posts here, since I’ll just be updating the gallery.
Some new designs to check out in the gallery: