Mini lanterns on a LED series

I made a set of small paper lanterns for a LED light series we have on a wall (indoors!). The paper lanterns are stylish and easy to make - they are a standard type of origami called 'fusen', which means balloon. I learned about them from the book The Simple Art of Japanese Papercrafts by Mari Ono. These little cubes are inflated after folding, and the air hole was very convenient for putting the fusen on a LED lamp.



The ones I made for this project are quite small. I used 7.5x7.5 cm paper, and the side of the cube is always a quarter of the side of the paper you started with. Since the LEDs don't give off any heat, the small size is not a problem. The origami paper diffuses the light very nicely, and the colors of the papers show up very bright.

Best of all, the color scheme infinitely adjustable, just by adding and removing colors according to seasons, holidays and moods!

Wintry Moiré

I saw an awesome Moiré pattern, formed from two perforated sheets of metal at slightly different distances from the camera. This gives a slight size difference, and therefore a slight frequency mismatch for the two sheets. It's nice how the original hexagonal pattern of the holes is repeated, hugely, in the Moiré pattern (much nicer than the boring examples on Wikipedia)!

New Hama Anti-Ad Sign

Our previous 'no advertisements' sign proved so popular that it was actually stolen (or anyway, it disappeared, most likely it fell down and was cleaned away or something). So I made a new one.

The new sign is made with Hama beads, like the old one. The sign has 01 White text on a 17 Grey background. I also made a glow-in-the-dark frame, with 55 Glow-in-the-dark green and 57 Glow-in-the-dark blue. It looks quite nice, a pop of bright color in the dark hallway, but it was very difficult to photograph!

The text, "Ei mainoksia kiitos!", is Finnish for "No advertisements please".

Iridescent frying pan

Our stainless steel frying pan with colorful patterns. Frying stuff in this pan is not particularly nice, since everything, including bacon, seems to stick unless I add lots of fat. The colors offer some consolation, though. I suspect these colors appear due to light interference in a thin film of oxide on the pan's surface.


This picture of a Bismuth crystal from Wikipedia shows the same effect. The crystal is covered with a thin oxide layer. When light reflected from the top and bottom of the oxide layer interfere, the colors appear. I like the G-shaped growth patterns in this picture even more than the rainbow coloration.

Botany

Yesterday, I finished working on an idea for I had for learning to use Blender, an open-source program for making three-dimensional models. The result is called Botany, it's also on my art page.

Basically, I wanted to make something that utilizes and shows off the flat surfaces used in 3D modelling. Usually, one tries to hide away the sharp edges and use tons of triangles and effects to make it look organic. The other main idea was to make an image that's supposed to be two-dimensional, and not a snapshot of a 3D scene (which it is, too, nevertheless).

The idea came from designing boxes for the platform game. The thought is to draw simple sectors on a square, and shade them in a way that's compatible with a three-dimensional interpretation.
I thought up as many of these sectored squares as I could, and constructed and arranged them in Blender. The main part of the work was placing the nodes and connecting the right ones, to form the geometry I wanted.

As a bonus, I took some landscape snapshots as well. I used Blender's depth-of-field feature, which I probably don't know enough about, but as you can see, the result isn't that great on edges with a high contrast.

Bubbles III

A beautiful phenomenon discovered while doing the dishes.

Laser cutting Girih tiles

The laser cutter at Fab Lab Groningen.


The machine can both engrave and cut. It is almost magical to see one's design gradually appear as a physical object. Here the laser is cutting our girih tiles from a 3 mm acrylic sheet. The machine does the engraving first, one sees the knot pattern formed by the pieces appear. This is how girih patterns typically look when they are used for decoration, you see the knot pattern but not the borders between the pieces. Then the pieces are cut. The cut lines are quite different from the lines drawn on the tiles. Probably this is part of the reason for the complexity and beauty of girih patterns.


I find the Fab Lab concept fantastic, giving anyone the chance to use this kind of professional fabrication machines. They had 3D printers and a CNC mill as well. Not to mention the nice people at the Fab Lab, guiding me through the process of using the laser cutter!

Someone else also made a set of  laser cut girih tiles, at the Fab Lab in Lille. Some more pictures of our tiles, and the svg file for the laser cutter.

Neon beads and necklace

I recently bought some fluorescent pink pigment, and thought I'd try making fluorescent polymer clay beads. I mixed the pigment with translucent white Fimo clay, by chopping up the clay, forming chunks, and chopping again. The neon pigment behaves very oddly in photographs...


The beads looked lamely pink before curing, but regained the bright fluorescence in the oven. The beads are one-sixths of a Fimo stripe, and I needed 44 of them for a necklace.

Spectral Hair Accessory

Laser Ruler

Translucent ruler acting as an optical cable.

Crystal foot

Got a large green glass "crystal" as a birthday present. Very pretty, but impossible to put on display... so I made a stand for it, from translucent polymer clay. Shown in the middle, the last shape-checking before it went into the oven. Above right: all done.

The crystal in its proper orientation. Showing nice green phenomena in the sunlight.

Stickies