Origami techniques

Wet folding

Wet folding is a technique involving the application of water to the paper in order to disolve the glue, called sizing, in the paper so that it can be shaped and molded more freely, with soft or curved creases, and to product a more permanant final product. Once the paper has dried, the sizing will harden in the new shape making the resulting model more permantly creased than most dry folding can accomplish.

Often, once a crease has been made, clamps, clips, wire, string, and other devices will be employed to hold the model in the desired position until it has dried completely.

Tips:

• Fold a model you know well enough to fold quickly, as the internal layers dry it becomes harder to remoisten them
• Generally try to avoid applying water to areas that have been creased. The broken fibers of the crease will soak up more water than the surrounding areas.
• If the paper has the reflective sheen of water on it, you have probably used too much and you should let the paper dry a bit before trying to fold it. The paper feel kind of like leather.

Dry tension folding

A technique that uses the springy nature of the paper itself, coupled with locks, to create models that have volume that is crated simply by the forces of the paper.

Modular folding

Modular, or unit, origami involves the folding of many copies of one or more types of unit which are then assembled into a larger model. Modular models are most often geometric, although some representation modulars do exist. One of the best known types of unit is the Sonobe unit .

Crumpling

Creating origami models by strategicly crushing the paper to create more organic structures. This technique is most associated with Vincent Floderer and his troupe le crimp.

This type of origami is questioned by some purists and lay people due to the lact of specific guidelines and crease structures.

Precision

There are many ways to improve one's folding precision...

• When multiple options exist, use the references that are closest to the crease being made. This is most applicable with folding grids or many subdivisons of an area. As the paper is creased, the creases themselves distort the distances being measured by the folds. If reference points close to the new crease are used, errors will propgate downward into that area but they will not propogate across the entire model.
• Often it is more important to focus on where the crease you are creating should be and less on the reference points for making the crease. This is particularly true as the paper begins to "creep " due to many layers.
• Knowing the model is very important because often paper creep can be mitigated by making some folds "short" of the target references so that later folds will cause those edges to creep to the desired location.
• Knowing the model can also be helpful in determining which creases need exacting precision and which can be more precise.
• Paying attention to all the relevant reference points before creating the crease is important. It is also good to use as many reference points as possible if more than the minimum necessary already exist.