#lukasheva

Hiya! It’s been a long time. Things are getting better, but. Anyways, lets talk origami.

So I took the Rafaelita unit and stretched it along both axes. The top two pictures are one way and the bottom the other. Interestingly, they’re obviously both edge units, but in one, they became face-joining and in the other, vertex-joining. The top is disassembled because hexagons, while beautiful and perfect and my favorite shape, are not terribly stable, and refused to cooperate.

Hiya! Here are two Buckyballs made with Lukasheva’s Rafaelits module! The one on the left is the version with triangular faces whereas the one on the right is composed of hexagons and pentagons.

I decided to make both because I hate myself there was something that felt weird about the triangular facet version every time I’ve made it. Well, except the first, but that was with PHiZZ units, and yearsyearsyears ago, so I’m not counting it. Please ignore the detritus on the desk and also the gaps - the Rafaelita don’t like sixes.

The problem I have with the triangular facet version of the buckyball is this: it looks like an icosahedron. I included an extra shot of the triangular one so that you could see the division into giant triangle faces. There are twenty of them. Each on of them is one hexagon on a normal Buckyball (of course) and 1/5 of the pentagon at each corner.

Here’s the difference. Towards the bottom of this page on Euler’s Theorem (one of many, I’m assuming), it states that you cannot have have the sum of three angles at a vertex equal 360° - that’d be flat. You’d be tiling the plane. Basically, you won’t have groups of three hexagons; the interior angle is 120°. When we’re using triangles, though, the interior angle is 60°, so the problem is triangles in groups of six. 

Now! The cool thing about the triangular facet version - there are clusters of six triangles EVERYWHERE. There are far more than twenty. Yes, they get used multiple times, that’s irrelevant. So, basically, you have would have a giant flat plane if there weren’t the clusters of five triangles that act as the vertex for the giant triangle faces. Planes can easily bend in one direction and when you complete your buckyball, you’ll see lines that form the edges of the triangles, running right through hexagons. It’s really neat.

Now, there are two conclusions to be drawn from this:

Because you’re making giant triangle faces, you’d get an octahedron if you exchanged the group of five triangles at the edge for a group of four, and a tetrahedron with a cluster of three.

And, since we’re not constrained against tiling the plane, we can actually make the faces have more or fewer triangles, as long as it follows a couple of specific rules.

Talk about an interesting project! We used Lukasheva’s Rafaelita module and made an dodecahedron. Lauren, the Art Therapist, chose the 12 colors and the 5 variations of the colors. Folding the pieces was easy, assembling it was, ultimately, easy, and coloring the facets was easy (I would assume - I did none of that). I was in charge of the folding and coördinating the colors. Coördinating the colors was a beast.

We had the palettes for the colors before painting the units, of course. As you can see, I kept a tried to keep order by placement in a circle and by marking off shades we’d used. The painters tape to keep the colors in order? A godsend. Without it, this would’ve been incredible difficult.

It’s hard to see in the pictures, but there are 60 distinct colors on this dodecahedron. Some, such as the green are orders of magnitude different. The black face? Although inappropriately referred to just now, the facets were different, but subtly. Different enough to recognize, but not quite enough to see, if that makes sense. 

If anyone ever tells you you have too much painter’s tape, don’t trust them. They’re probably trying to steal some of your painter’s tape because they don’t have enough.

At my mom’s school, there’s an Art Therapy student working on her Master’s. Apparently her Master’s thesis has something to do with color choice (specifically with neurodivergent students? I’m not sure). My mom was supposed to send me the paper, but I never got it, so. Details. Regardless, she saw this and mentioned to Mother Dearest that she wanted to talk to me about making something kinesthetically manipulable for her with different colors. I’ve not actually met with her, so I have no idea what she ACTUALLY WANTS. That’s okay, though. I decided for her. You can’t tell in the pictures, I think, but it’s actually pretty large - I used a thick cardstock cut into 8 3/4″ squares, which I’d say was fun, but there’s no way for me to accurately portray how sarcastic I’d be. I chose oil pastels over India inks for a bunch of reasons that I don’t feel like typing. I chose Lukasheva’s Rafaelita for a few reasons that, again, I don’t feel like typing.

This is the money kusudama. Make one and you’ll have $150 you need to unfold before you spend it.

Sorry, couldn’t resist. It’s a wedding gift for my BEST FRIEND who’s marrying my OTHER BEST FRIEND and guess who’s performing the ceremony?! ME

The model is the Dollar Crocus from Lukasheva’s first book. I had wanted to make it with tens, but it wasn’t economically feasible. That being said, I was super pleased with the succulency the pink tips lent it. It was incredibly disorienting to work with money. It is NOT paper, and for all that I use tons of different kinds of paper, this was the most NOT paper material I’ve folded. Also, the print on the paper made connecting the units very confusing for the first couple.

My latest model folded, Kusudama Paradigma by Ekaterina Lukasheva

Got the instruction from tadashimori's YouTube channel