Sex and origami

[saadya]

mleonard wrote:
>Is it just me, or do the two pieces above border on the pornographic? Not that I think that is a bad thing, you understand.

Now now, Ernestine is quite prim and proper. At MOST----I may have ‘lifted’ eyelids & eyebrows from some distant memory of a Chinese print of a woman in ecstasy…. But that’s as far as that goes.

The other figure, well….

I wanted, as with other things in the show where it was displayed, BOTH to get a strong reaction, and to keep viewers acutely aware that it was just this piece of flimsy, cheap paper with a few folds that was doing it to them.

Anyway I’m glad if my things turn you on (or border on it).

-----------
bshuval wrote:
>I think that hair is very difficult to convey in paper.

‘Easy’ and ‘hard' are interesting terms in this context, and part of the value of this discussion is going to be retrospective.

The difficulty you mention for hair, for example, is right now mostly one of imagination! If I may be allowed to mention personal experience here, I know that while I singled out hair as a problem 18 months ago, and have moved through five or six stages of thinking on it in all that time (which now seems incredibly sluggish) there are LOTS of good answers waiting out there. Once they are put forward, it will seem perfectly simple to make hair. [After using PLEATS as a first or second solution, I was astonished, looking around, to see that though they’ve been available for at least two decades and have been used in all manner of hedgehogs & such, they haven’t been used for humans! And you’ll agree there’s nothing so easy as a pleat.]

In a few years when most of the problems have been ironed out it is going to seem like the easiest thing in the world to make a satisfying head, maybe even a female one, and only those who actually did the work---pushed and tried and failed and tried something else and failed and kept at it till it came out right—will remember what it took to find those simple solutions.

I promised a long explanation on faces. This isn’t it. But given the choice between writing out answers and folding a few----tonight I’d rather fold.

http://www.saadya.net/female/n’other.jpg

[saadya]

(I'm new at this:)

[mleonard]

Yes, Ernestine is quite prim and proper - which somehow makes her more erotic... Obviously I'm reading something into the (lower half of the) figure which isn't there...

If you find you've made a mistake in a posting you can use the "edit" button to amend it, rather than posting a correction.

[origami_8]

If you find you've made a mistake in a posting you can use the "edit" button to amend it, rather than posting a correction.

Thank you for pointing that out.

[mleonard]

Work in progress:



OK, so it's an alien - but at least it's a young alien. And, I maintain, female...

[esato]

Work in progress:
OK, so it's an alien - but at least it's a young alien. And, I maintain, female...

To me it looks like a Japanese woman!

[saadya]

loose lips sink ships
Been working, within my context, on lips alone:

[mleonard]

Interesting. I've also had a go at colour-changed lips, but the results were a bit too "cartoonish" for my liking:



I've been thinking about hair as well... image to follow later, hopefully.

[saadya]

I finally got around to finishing that face I started the other night:



And so maybe I’ve earned the right to a few words on the subject of this thread.

http://www.saadya.net/female/faces.htm

[wolf]

And so maybe I’ve earned the right to a few words on the subject of this thread.

So....uhhhhhhh......soft lines good, hard lines bad?

Here's another problem - how do you distinguish a young male face, especially one in the Greek male hero style, from that of a female?

[mleonard]

I think Saadya has already gone some way to answering that question:



Excellent article. The Modigliani images are intriguing.

Meanwhile, I have been retreating further into abstraction:

[wolf]

I think Saadya has already gone some way to answering that question:

I know, I was just being somewhat facetious.

One other difficulty with faces is shadows - not so much a problem if the face you're working with is large (eg in masks and busts type models), but when your working area is a few centimeters across, for instance, a face that's incorporated into a full human model, even the slightest shadow can result in a drastic difference in its appearance.

In some cases though, this can be used advantageously - cf Hojyo Takashi's models, where a simple horizontal pleat across the face produces shadows reminiscent of sunken eye sockets and hence eyes. And sometimes it can work disastrously - for instance, when adding a headband or sunglasses using pleats. The shadow cast by the lower pleat of these features end up producing unwanted eyes on the face and ends up making the face look odd.

[mleonard]

Yep. I think this may be a reason why Saadya's vertical line from nose to chin works, even though it has no basis in nature. Because it is vertical, in normal lighting conditions it doesn't cast much of a shadow.

Which gives me an idea to create a face in which all of the features emerge from vertical pleats, and dispense with horizontal lines altogether. Of course this probably isn't possible, but it might be worth trying as an exercise.

[wolf]

Your post got me thinking about "normal lighting conditions" - that's really a bummer if someone wants to display a model at a convention, and the conditions are less than adequate! I now see why artists like Floderer bring their own lighting along.

Also, on vertical lines, it would seem like there's a tendency to form downward pleats in faces. That's where most of the shadowing problems come from, I think - shining a light on a downward pleat from above will always cast a downward shadow. Might be good in some cases like eyes but not so in other situations. Now, I wonder if it's possible to capture facial features using upward pleats, or a skillful combination of both?

Here's an ascii rendition of what I mean by a downward pleat:

Code: Select all

light direction
   vvvvvv

    |                         top of face
    |                                 |
  ||                        back-----|-----front
  |                                   |
  |                           bottom of face

[mleonard]

I was going to post something quite vague and theoretical about different sorts of pleats and how they might be used for making faces. But it now seems that many of the problems that we have been struggling with have been solved, by someone that I have never heard of before:



Apart from purely technical considerations, look at the way the mouth and the chin are modelled.

I'm afraid I know absolutely nothing about this guy, other than what you can find on this page:
Link