The Origami Forum

People who create origami on a regular basis-- do you have any non-technical insight into the process? I'm talking stuff like inspiration and the steps you go through in designing a model.

I'm not talking about the technical tidbits which are well documented in Lang's book.

Pick a theme (or two, or three) and work on it. And keep a notebook! For me, these are usually catchall books containing model ideas, sketches, partial diagrams, partial CPs, tree figures, etc, etc. A filled notebook is a wonderful reference (plus it makes you laugh at yourself, when you see the horrible things you did previously).

My own design process usually goes like this:
1. Decide what I want to do.
2. Google for pictures and descriptions.
3. Draw a rough sketch showing the pose and profile, taking note of the key features.
4. Convert sketch into tree figure.
5. Convert tree figure into circle/square packed CP.
6. Do some paper wranglin' to get the durned thing to collapse into a workable base.
7. Fill in details, details, details and details.
8. Repeat steps 2-7 until I'm satisfied.

I find it's usually good to work on 3-4 models in parallel, so if you get stuck on one, you just move to the next.As for themes, well, it seems to depend a lot on what your other hobbies are. The main ones I'm working on at the moment:

• d20 critters
• British mythology
• Chinese mythology
• Battletech vehicles

I can't say that I create things on a regular basis, but when I do create something, I try to figure out what is the one thing that makes something look like it does and work around that. Just for example, say I wanted to do a bear. What's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of a bear? Claws. So, I'm going to need a base with a head, a tail, and four legs with points on them that I can reverse fold claws into.

Lang's Origami Design Secrets is a wonderful reference for creating things because it doesn't tell you what to create. It just gives you the approaches for creating it, starting from bases to circle packing to grafting and point splitting to pattern grafting.

Thanks for the replies so far. I hadn't considered looking up images and then sketching them before. That was actually very helpful. I created a simple monkey design using that tip.

If you're looking into designing human figures, here are two very useful pages that describe human proportions:

http://www.realcolorwheel.com/human.htm
http://www.portrait-artist.org/misc/proportion.html

The other sections on the second website are quite interesting too. No more relying on landmarkless folds to get that figure "just right"!

Yes, thank you. The idea about sketching and looking up photos never occured to me, even though I consider myself an artist. And the sketch book as well, I'll have to start doing that.