On Wed, Feb 25, 2015 at 12:05 AM, Thomas <[email protected]> wrote:
> Parth D wrote: > > "I am trying to acquaint myself to wet folding but don't know how exactly. > Could anyone offer some tips, thank you. Also, what is a simple model I can > use so that I can learn wet folding?" > > John Montroll's Bringing Origami to Life has a explanation of wet folding. This is a very nice book, and includes some excellent models to try wet folding with: they're not too complex, so you can try them with thicker paper, and they all have ways you can add some 3D shaping. My own, first point about wet folding: the "wet" part is something of a misnomer. It really should be "damp" folding, but no one likes the way that sounds, I guess! Seriously, you should not over-wet the paper, or it will become fragile, rip and/or downright fall apart. You need to add just enough water to soften the paper before you fold, and no more. It should feel like soft cloth, or leather; it should be evenly damp, and not have dark spots, shiny spots, etc. Use a fine spray, and a small towel or paper towel to mop off excess. A nice, commonly-available paper for experimenting is Canson Mi-Teintes. It's usually available at art supply stores, in a myriad of colors. Like most non-origami papers, it's the same color on both sides, so it's not good for pieces that involve a color change of some sort. (You can backcoat it with another contrasting paper, but that's a whole 'nother lesson.) Thomas writes: 1. wetting the paper will cause it to temporarily loose shape, ie: it won't > be perfectly square. I it requires a diagnol fold make sure it goes from > corner to corner even though the opposite points won't line up properly. > The deal is that the fibers that make up papers can be thought of as long, flexible straws. When they absorb water (which all natural plant fibers love to do) they become wider, but not much longer - they swell across the diameter of the straw. Most machine-made paper has what is called "grain." Because of the manufacturing process, rather than fiber direction being randomly distributed in the paper there are more fibers aligned in one direction than any other. This direction is usually parallel to one of the edges of the paper. Thus, when you wet a piece of machine-made paper, it will swell more in one direction than another - it swells *across* the grain. And so if you cut a piece of machine-made paper into a square, and then wet it... it will no longer be square, it will become a rectangle. You can still fold the piece from this rectangle, but be aware that you have to adjust your folding techniques a bit. In particular, to fold a rectangle diagonally in half, you have to fold a crease which goes from the corners through the center of the paper... but when you do this, the opposite corners will NOT align like they do when you do this with a square. (For an extreme example, think about folding the diagonals of a piece of copier paper.) You have to make the crease not by aligning matching corner, but instead by forming the crease accurately from endpoint-to-endpoint. 2. wet folding is best done with thicker paper, and for models for which > curved and or molded surfaces are desired Personally, I'd modify this a bit to say that it's best to use thicker paper when first starting out in wet folding; but it's a useful technique for thinner stuff, too, when you want to shape a piece, or fold parts very tightly (as in insect legs). Or, flipped the other way, you could say that wet folding is a technique that makes it *possible* to fold thick stuff - I like to use medium-weight watercolor papers, which are otherwise impossible to fold, as they just crack or wrinkle unevenly. The bottom line is: practice, experiment, and practice some more. Learning to handle damp paper is a slightly different physical skill than folding regular-weight, dry stuff, and will take a while to get used to. I hope that's useful! Anne
