Tuesday 17 April 2012

Origami Portrait - beginning

Hello,
It's been a while. We've just moved into a lovely old house so close to the zoo I can hear the lions roaring at night, so although it's a nice place to be, it's been a bit hectic lately. I've also had much trouble setting up the internet here, but no matter, because I have been on uni holidays, and the break from the distractions of the internet has allowed me to make a good beginning on my new project. The idea came to me at uni one day when I was waiting for a lecture to start. I'd found this tutorial a while ago when I was making christmas crafts and I began thinking that I could make boxes from squares of old magazines and turn them into a portrait. It wasn't until a good few days into this project that I realised how big the task is. But I'm hoping the payoff will be equally large.

So I started off by gridding up the picture I want to recreate, and deciding what shades and colours I would use. I decided on three shades of skins colour (so I wouldn't be completely overwhelmed trying to find exact shades in the magazines), hair colour, black and white, and a background colour - blue. Here is the grid.


I copied it into a maths book to help define the shades I would use, and expand the picture, to make sure the final product would show the detail of the glasses.
Next I had to go through a heap of magazines to find pages with the right colours/shades.


These were cut so that I would get lots of squares of the appropriate colours. I started by drawing up the grids on the magazines and cutting it with scissors, but soon found, a craft knife a lot faster, and use the width of the ruler as the length of the sides of my squares, so there's no need for measuring and ruling, I just lay the edge of the ruler against the edge of the magazine and cut down the other side of the ruler with the craft knife.


So now I had to fold the boxes. Here's that link to the tutorial again.



Cute, aren't they? They're about 1cm wide, and 5mm high.
So then I have to separate them out into the three shades of skin colour:


and all the other colours:


And finally I have begun to glue them together, following my pattern. If you look with the right kind of eyes, you can tell that the part I've completed is his left eye and some of his glasses.


Hope to bring the finished project to you soon! (but not too soon, because I have another few thousand boxes to make - wish me luck)

See my progress here

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