Me at a Civil Air Patrol Rocketry Encampment.
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BioHi.
My name is Aiden Stephan. I'm 16 and currently am more or less living in two places at once; Port Orford and Chiloquin, both in Oregon. I have many hobbies; Model building, art in most medias, playing instruments, writing, and exploring, to name a few. One of my favorites is Origami, the art of paper folding. I have long hoped to meet other artists with interests similar to those of myself and created this site to help me in the endeavor. In the process my website has also become a way for me effectively self-document some of my projects, and become more than a little bit of a project itself. I hope you enjoy viewing my art, - Aiden Stephan |
About My Site
I have designed this website to both display and categorize some of my many projects. I like to keep the things I do organized, but sometimes have difficulty doing so - this was my solution. Also, I have created my site somewhat for use as an information source for anyone interested in things similar to what I am interested in. I have often felt quite alone in figuring out how to build a certain type of model, fold something from origami, play a certain piece of music, etc., and so I would like to try to help remedy some of this lack of readily available information for others. I certainly cannot do this completely myself, but at least I can contribute to the effort.
I started building this website using the site-builder Weebly sometime early 2016 to showcase some of my origami. It went from a few uploaded pics of my random folds to a full gallery featuring every one of my folded, original designs. I expanded it to include crease patterns for all of my models, a number of different origami resources and diagrams of many of my design process breakthroughs only to decide to add pages to display 80% of my other hobbies. I finished it fairly recently and I'd be happy to hear if you have any thoughts or input.
The name "Foldigami" was created by combining "folding" and "origami," resulting in a funny and memorable name original enough to eliminate concerns about copyright infringements. Although "Studio" often denotes professionalism, in my case, such a thing is not meant to be implied; I simply picked the name because it was the only single word I new of - or could find - that provided an apt description of a creative workplace, such as my bedroom, from which a variety of products emerge.
Finally, please keep in mind while viewing my site that it is a work in progress. It has taken me much time just to get all of the pages created, keyworded, edited and published and so, in the future, I will continue to fix minor errors wherever I find them and add more pages featuring my creations.
I started building this website using the site-builder Weebly sometime early 2016 to showcase some of my origami. It went from a few uploaded pics of my random folds to a full gallery featuring every one of my folded, original designs. I expanded it to include crease patterns for all of my models, a number of different origami resources and diagrams of many of my design process breakthroughs only to decide to add pages to display 80% of my other hobbies. I finished it fairly recently and I'd be happy to hear if you have any thoughts or input.
The name "Foldigami" was created by combining "folding" and "origami," resulting in a funny and memorable name original enough to eliminate concerns about copyright infringements. Although "Studio" often denotes professionalism, in my case, such a thing is not meant to be implied; I simply picked the name because it was the only single word I new of - or could find - that provided an apt description of a creative workplace, such as my bedroom, from which a variety of products emerge.
Finally, please keep in mind while viewing my site that it is a work in progress. It has taken me much time just to get all of the pages created, keyworded, edited and published and so, in the future, I will continue to fix minor errors wherever I find them and add more pages featuring my creations.
My Origami History
I was first introduced to origami when I was almost six years old. Our local library had been stationed in very cramped quarters sharing the Police Station for long time and had made a goal of folding 1,000 origami peace cranes. The idea was to make a wish for funds to build a new library in our small town on the coast. My mother, always very involved in the community and associated projects, taught herself how to fold origami cranes to help the library staff accomplish their goal. In the process, she also taught me how to fold these classic origami figures and I was soon doing my part, helping fold crane after crane. After the number 1,000 had been reached, we stopped folding and origami lapsed from my interest. We succeeded however, and now our town (that we have since moved from) has a beautiful, new library for everyone to enjoy.
One day, some years later, as I was reorganizing and sorting through my bookshelf, I discovered an old, decrepit copy of Robert J. Lang's first book, "The Complete Book of Origami." Curious (and probably a bit bored), I started paging through it and was amazed by the variety of figures represented in the book and fascinated by the fact that they were all created from one piece of paper. That night, instead of getting a story for my mother to read, I brought out the old book and asked my mother to help me fold something. That night, and throughout the next few weeks, my mother helped me to fold some of the simplest models in the book, and mildly interested, I kept wanting to create more advanced models. Even though these were still relatively quite simple, my ambitions quickly surpassed my mother's abilities and interest and, unable to figure it out on my own, I gave up in frustration. Coincidentally, it seems like it was just a few months later, sometime when I was eight, when my grandmother sent me a package of origami paper. It was cheap, but it was folding paper nonetheless. My grandmother has always seemed to consider me a "very creative and intelligent boy," and, at some point, she took it upon herself to supply me with different ideas for projects and art materials for me to occupy myself with (which she still does now). The origami paper seemed to just be another one of these creative suggestions, but, remembering the book I had discovered earlier, I took to the idea and resolved to become an origamist. Quickly exhausting my mother as a resource, I started teaching myself how to fold more complex figures using Dr. Lang's book. And so, I went through a good part of the book, folding one model at a time in the sequence in which they were organized, which progressed by level of difficulty. Sometimes I would work on the same model for many days at a time, trying to follow the folding sequence and make sense of the confusing diagrams, but more often than not, I succeeded, building my library of origami knowledge bit by bit. After a month or so I exhausted my paper supply, and, having recognized the limitations of printer paper, ordered more from amazon.com, I was hooked.
After that, all I wanted to do was fold origami. I started buying, borrowing and stealing all the origami books I could find and folding everything in them. My skills increased rapidly and I was soon able to fold all of the models in most books, including everything in the one I had started with. Constantly hungry for more models to fold of ever-increasing complexity, I kept buying more books and paper.
I was content with this for some time and was still folding away when, slowly but surely, I started to encounter the first of multiple major barriers I was to come up against - this had to do with the relationship between the paper used for folding and the amount of folds it can take before becoming impossible to work with or ripping.
Starting to get into folding very complex figures with many appendages - bugs in particular (although there were others) - I kept getting most of the way through the model only to end up with a springy, ripped shape that was barely reminiscent of my intentions. Often a model would take two or three hours to complete and it was VERY frustrating when it turned out poorly and there was nothing I could do about it. I realized what my problem was but had no idea as to how to fix it. If you bought "origami paper" shouldn't it be possible for it to be folded into anything? As I found, this is, sadly, not the truth.
Somewhere during the time when my crisis was reaching it's pinnacle, it occurred to me that Robert Lang might just know something about paper, and that it might be a good idea to check if he had a website. Perhaps, I thought, it might contain some helpful suggestions. Sure enough, it only took me a few minutes to find his website and locate his article on Origami paper. Excited to find a lead in solving my problem, I read the whole article two or three times. It mostly focused on wet-folding and associated papers, but I for some reason dismissed the part of the article entirely, thinking it was an extremely hard folding method only suitable for experts like Dr. Lang. It did, however, mention an origami paper called tissue foil that could easily be made at home with tinfoil, tissue paper and spray adhesive. I took to the idea and decided to try and make myself some. Once again enlisting the services of my mother, I bought the materials and, together, we made my first sheet of tissue foil. I started cutting it to square almost immediately and was very impressed by how thin and malleable it was. It was only a few hours later that I finished folding a simple(r) bee from diagrams found on the internet - I had finished without ripping the paper and I had also been able to shape the legs, wings and antennae to my liking with very little trouble.
Nearly ecstatic at my new discovery, I bought another origami book and a few hundred sheets of tissue paper and, quickly learning how to make tissue-foil on my own, started folding all of the models that had defeated me in the past.
Meeting with success after success I kept folding models, not doing so quite as often as before, but still plenty.
Sometime later, by the time I was eleven or twelve, I had stopped folding almost completely. I had folded every model in every one of my books, often two or three or twenty times, and bought, with the exception of a few of the most expensive and complicated or overly simple publications, pretty much every origami book on the market. I had discovered some of the shortcomings of tissue foil, mainly that it was delicate, the colors from the tissue foil faded quickly and it was hard to pre-crease, and found no easy alternative. Although my skill still had a few shortcomings, I couldn't figure out how to collapse crease patterns (CPs) for example, I pretty much felt I had conquered the art. I could fold pretty much anything I wanted, could make my own paper (still tissue-foil), and I had even figured out how to design a few of my own simple models by modifying existing designs, "doodling" (randomly folding and seeing what happened), and improvising my own bases. On top of all that, the only books I knew of that I was interested in were way out of my budget, and so was any kind of better paper.
I had pretty much quit folding completely when, one day while I was surfing the internet, I discovered Robert Lang's recently published "Origami Design Secrets." Not really that interested, I casually mentioned the book to my mother who encouraged me to purchase the book. At first I decided not to buy it, but for some reason I just couldn't stop thinking about it. Finally, almost two months later, I bought the book.
As soon as it got to my house I read the whole thing, but sadly, although I was fascinated by the techniques described in the book, I was also unable to make enough sense of them to incorporate the methods into my own designs. Discouraged, I stopped folding completely for a little over a year.
But.............Somehow, for some reason, the book seemed to stick in the back of my head, bugging me from time to time, and it was sometime in January 2014, when I rediscovered the book while reorganizing my bookshelf in my room. I read the whole book again and reread the last half of the book at least three times, but this time, I began to understand the concepts presented. After about a week of experimenting, I began to feel more confident, and it was only a short time later that I finished folding my first self-designed model, a flying walking stick insect.
I have to admit that this was a bit of an overly ambitious subject to try to design as my first model, but even so, my final result had two wings, six legs, a head and antennae. Despite my initial success, I, being the perfectionist I am, wasn't happy with the first one, and so after a redesign, I folded another flying walking stick bug which was much better than the last (I'm still folding different versions of this subject).
This was very exciting for me, and it started a frenzy of designing and folding where every spare moment of my life was dedicated to one of these activities. Sadly, it was not to last. Just a few weeks later, days after leaving for a spring vacation (my siblings and I are homeschooled so this kind of thing can happen) I broke my right wrist roller blading. Fortunately, I'm left handed, but it still made it impossible for me to fold properly, despite my determined resolutions about learning to do it one handed. What I could still do though, is draw crease patterns. So that's pretty much all I did for the two months that our trip lasted.
That pretty much gets us all the way up to the present. My wrist has healed, and I am still folding the models I designed during that trip and inventing others in between. My crease pattern collapsing abilities have improved hugely, I have bought the second edition of Origami Design Secrets and have started dabbling in things I have avoided before such as wet folding, sizing, hybridizing design techniques, and using handmade, purpose-designed paper.
Origami is still one of my favorite pastimes and I encourage others to give it a try.
I hope you enjoy seeing my models as much as I do folding them!
One day, some years later, as I was reorganizing and sorting through my bookshelf, I discovered an old, decrepit copy of Robert J. Lang's first book, "The Complete Book of Origami." Curious (and probably a bit bored), I started paging through it and was amazed by the variety of figures represented in the book and fascinated by the fact that they were all created from one piece of paper. That night, instead of getting a story for my mother to read, I brought out the old book and asked my mother to help me fold something. That night, and throughout the next few weeks, my mother helped me to fold some of the simplest models in the book, and mildly interested, I kept wanting to create more advanced models. Even though these were still relatively quite simple, my ambitions quickly surpassed my mother's abilities and interest and, unable to figure it out on my own, I gave up in frustration. Coincidentally, it seems like it was just a few months later, sometime when I was eight, when my grandmother sent me a package of origami paper. It was cheap, but it was folding paper nonetheless. My grandmother has always seemed to consider me a "very creative and intelligent boy," and, at some point, she took it upon herself to supply me with different ideas for projects and art materials for me to occupy myself with (which she still does now). The origami paper seemed to just be another one of these creative suggestions, but, remembering the book I had discovered earlier, I took to the idea and resolved to become an origamist. Quickly exhausting my mother as a resource, I started teaching myself how to fold more complex figures using Dr. Lang's book. And so, I went through a good part of the book, folding one model at a time in the sequence in which they were organized, which progressed by level of difficulty. Sometimes I would work on the same model for many days at a time, trying to follow the folding sequence and make sense of the confusing diagrams, but more often than not, I succeeded, building my library of origami knowledge bit by bit. After a month or so I exhausted my paper supply, and, having recognized the limitations of printer paper, ordered more from amazon.com, I was hooked.
After that, all I wanted to do was fold origami. I started buying, borrowing and stealing all the origami books I could find and folding everything in them. My skills increased rapidly and I was soon able to fold all of the models in most books, including everything in the one I had started with. Constantly hungry for more models to fold of ever-increasing complexity, I kept buying more books and paper.
I was content with this for some time and was still folding away when, slowly but surely, I started to encounter the first of multiple major barriers I was to come up against - this had to do with the relationship between the paper used for folding and the amount of folds it can take before becoming impossible to work with or ripping.
Starting to get into folding very complex figures with many appendages - bugs in particular (although there were others) - I kept getting most of the way through the model only to end up with a springy, ripped shape that was barely reminiscent of my intentions. Often a model would take two or three hours to complete and it was VERY frustrating when it turned out poorly and there was nothing I could do about it. I realized what my problem was but had no idea as to how to fix it. If you bought "origami paper" shouldn't it be possible for it to be folded into anything? As I found, this is, sadly, not the truth.
Somewhere during the time when my crisis was reaching it's pinnacle, it occurred to me that Robert Lang might just know something about paper, and that it might be a good idea to check if he had a website. Perhaps, I thought, it might contain some helpful suggestions. Sure enough, it only took me a few minutes to find his website and locate his article on Origami paper. Excited to find a lead in solving my problem, I read the whole article two or three times. It mostly focused on wet-folding and associated papers, but I for some reason dismissed the part of the article entirely, thinking it was an extremely hard folding method only suitable for experts like Dr. Lang. It did, however, mention an origami paper called tissue foil that could easily be made at home with tinfoil, tissue paper and spray adhesive. I took to the idea and decided to try and make myself some. Once again enlisting the services of my mother, I bought the materials and, together, we made my first sheet of tissue foil. I started cutting it to square almost immediately and was very impressed by how thin and malleable it was. It was only a few hours later that I finished folding a simple(r) bee from diagrams found on the internet - I had finished without ripping the paper and I had also been able to shape the legs, wings and antennae to my liking with very little trouble.
Nearly ecstatic at my new discovery, I bought another origami book and a few hundred sheets of tissue paper and, quickly learning how to make tissue-foil on my own, started folding all of the models that had defeated me in the past.
Meeting with success after success I kept folding models, not doing so quite as often as before, but still plenty.
Sometime later, by the time I was eleven or twelve, I had stopped folding almost completely. I had folded every model in every one of my books, often two or three or twenty times, and bought, with the exception of a few of the most expensive and complicated or overly simple publications, pretty much every origami book on the market. I had discovered some of the shortcomings of tissue foil, mainly that it was delicate, the colors from the tissue foil faded quickly and it was hard to pre-crease, and found no easy alternative. Although my skill still had a few shortcomings, I couldn't figure out how to collapse crease patterns (CPs) for example, I pretty much felt I had conquered the art. I could fold pretty much anything I wanted, could make my own paper (still tissue-foil), and I had even figured out how to design a few of my own simple models by modifying existing designs, "doodling" (randomly folding and seeing what happened), and improvising my own bases. On top of all that, the only books I knew of that I was interested in were way out of my budget, and so was any kind of better paper.
I had pretty much quit folding completely when, one day while I was surfing the internet, I discovered Robert Lang's recently published "Origami Design Secrets." Not really that interested, I casually mentioned the book to my mother who encouraged me to purchase the book. At first I decided not to buy it, but for some reason I just couldn't stop thinking about it. Finally, almost two months later, I bought the book.
As soon as it got to my house I read the whole thing, but sadly, although I was fascinated by the techniques described in the book, I was also unable to make enough sense of them to incorporate the methods into my own designs. Discouraged, I stopped folding completely for a little over a year.
But.............Somehow, for some reason, the book seemed to stick in the back of my head, bugging me from time to time, and it was sometime in January 2014, when I rediscovered the book while reorganizing my bookshelf in my room. I read the whole book again and reread the last half of the book at least three times, but this time, I began to understand the concepts presented. After about a week of experimenting, I began to feel more confident, and it was only a short time later that I finished folding my first self-designed model, a flying walking stick insect.
I have to admit that this was a bit of an overly ambitious subject to try to design as my first model, but even so, my final result had two wings, six legs, a head and antennae. Despite my initial success, I, being the perfectionist I am, wasn't happy with the first one, and so after a redesign, I folded another flying walking stick bug which was much better than the last (I'm still folding different versions of this subject).
This was very exciting for me, and it started a frenzy of designing and folding where every spare moment of my life was dedicated to one of these activities. Sadly, it was not to last. Just a few weeks later, days after leaving for a spring vacation (my siblings and I are homeschooled so this kind of thing can happen) I broke my right wrist roller blading. Fortunately, I'm left handed, but it still made it impossible for me to fold properly, despite my determined resolutions about learning to do it one handed. What I could still do though, is draw crease patterns. So that's pretty much all I did for the two months that our trip lasted.
That pretty much gets us all the way up to the present. My wrist has healed, and I am still folding the models I designed during that trip and inventing others in between. My crease pattern collapsing abilities have improved hugely, I have bought the second edition of Origami Design Secrets and have started dabbling in things I have avoided before such as wet folding, sizing, hybridizing design techniques, and using handmade, purpose-designed paper.
Origami is still one of my favorite pastimes and I encourage others to give it a try.
I hope you enjoy seeing my models as much as I do folding them!
