You're invited to my first ever "Papershake Preview"!

This is a free 15min taster workshop for anyone in my network (and beyond!) who is interested in finding out for themselves what this "origami for teams" thing is all about.

Perhaps you're looking for a fresh and engaging and new activity for an upcoming event, and want to try it out first, or are interested in the health benefits of creativity that I like to talk about here on LinkedIn.

Or you just would value a 15min brain reset at the end of a hot week!

OK, so full disclosure, we're all here on LinkedIn to network, and yep, I'd love to get more workshop bookings, but know this is very much not a sales pitch!

(in fact it's as much for me as anyone else - just to get me out there taking some risks!)

So let me know at michael@papershake.com if you would like to come. We'll fold a simple model together so just bring a sheet of A4/Letter/Printer paper, and get ready for a fun, relaxed and creative few minutes together!

I love being in the Flow state - whether its losing hours in the garden tending to new seedlings and clearing weeds, or getting deep into a programming project around my fine art work, or folding a complex model for its own pleasure.

By now most people know that the Flow State was so named by researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He found that individuals report their happiest and most satisfying moments when they are fully engaged in a challenging task that matches their abilities.

Perhaps this is what happens with my weeds and seedlings, or my fledgling attempts at C# programming?

I certainly try to get this balance in my online and in person workshops.
It's not easy to match the model to the participants' varying abilities when there are 30+ individuals, all with different experiences, but I'm always aiming for that creative satisfaction and so I work hard to get a sense of where the team and individuals are at, keeping an eye out for those who need either a little extra helping hand, or those that need a little extra challenge.

I think I get it right most of the time. Now I'm interested about how I could record and quantify this experience, creating a metric to measure it by... perhaps something for my programming hobby?!!

It's so funny how the same questions always come up in my online and inperson workshops , and I like to share this picture from a photoshoot for Stannah Stairlifts when this one is asked.

This massive, 9ft high paper footballer was designed as a playful replica of Mr Dickie Borthwick, the (self confessed!) oldest amateur footballer in the UK, as a starting point for conversations about older age, and challenging peoples' preconceptions.

It was a 3 month project with many stages of design and testing before the final production and shoot here at London's Primrose Hill and no need to say, but Mr Borthwick was delighted with the final model as was I!

Me and the team live at 6am on Primrose Hill

Final Live tweaks pre shoot

My studio in East London at the time

Did I really need to go this detailed? Yes, I think so!!

I was a suprise to log in to my Santander Business Banking, and spot these images from a recent quick project with Santander.

Sadly on the day I had a workshop to deliver online so wasn't able to be there in person to meet the famous pair, but did a few more shots which were used elsewhere. There was a larger campaign with origami which I wasn't involved in, but I got a least a little bit of the action for this cute origami dove.

Funnily enough, I had to create the bird from about 16 bills in the end to get it the right size, all printed and carefully compiled to give the right effect - there is always a degree of magic/trickery with these kind of projects I have come to discover, but the impact was great!

Now let's hope Origami can somehow make my bills themself!! 😅😆

Thanks A&D!

I've wanted to do this for ages - get a bunch of videos online for both my marketing and and also so that people can learn some simple models from standard good old A4 paper (or Letter in the US!).

A4-igami

This is the start of a little micro-series I will be launching on LinkedIn this autumn doing exactly that.

Check out the first model, a super simple A4 envelope that I love to teach in my online workshops too.

Love to hear how you get on!

Writing blogs is a new thing for me, though I must say I have always loved the act of writing, and as I child I always wanted to be an author – there is something in the process of getting thoughts into black and white that is deeply satisfying, not to mention “grounding” and stabilising for my inner mental landscape too.

It's tough when there is no brief

But the problem with a blog is that there’s no right or wrong – no client paying me to write it, or, perhaps more importantly, not paying me if it’s not up to standard or not delivered on time

Some early Papershake commissioned work for Oasis Visual Merchandising

Commercial Work is Always to Brief

Most of my commercial work stems from a need, a brief or a problem that needs to be solved; a client has an event which needs X kind of workshop, or there is a shop window that needs to be decorated with paper to tell Y story. This is great because my biggest job here is to understand the brief. That's what I try to do first and foremost with every commercial job I take on - understand the "what" and the "why" behind the client's ideas, and even more importantly, why Origami and Paper are the solution they think is most suited.

Even when a client says, "We have no fixed idea, we'd like you to run with it!", the truth is that there is at least some sense of an expectation, even if it's still deeply sub conscious.

My job is to find out what that is and use that as a starting point and take things from there.

The Problem with a Self-Led Fine Art Practice

There’s no brief for a blog, and no brief for a self-led Fine Art practice

A blog feels so final. Once it's written, it's there on the page and anyone can see it, read it, and then make a judgement about it, and by extension about me, for good or for bad. The outcome could be sometimes interesting, engaging and meaningful but could just as easily be a kind of stream of consciousness, a messy piece of writing that perhaps would be better not to be in the world at all!

With my own visual artwork, it's no different; There is no brief, there is no client, and often there is no end user, except maybe my empty walls, with the finished pieces staring back at me, demanding to know why they were created if this is going to be their life

A snippet of some recent Fine Art work, under my moniker "Michael J Trew"

But Some Artwork demands to be created

But sometimes things simply MUST be created. It's part of my nature to create, and I don't know why that is!

This is why commercial work is so great – I get to create and leave my literal and figurative fingerprints on the outcome, like a kind of signature. Even though the work looks "on brand" for whomever the client it, it also feels like there is a piece of me in it.

When there is no “On Brand” to Piggyback

The Commercial work works because there is a “flow”.

There is a need to meet, and a transaction of creative and financial energy between me and the client.

But what if there is no "on brand" to piggyback?

This flow is less clear with the fine art world, unless you are in the upper echelons and work to commission or have a bunch of collectors eager to snap up your next works, but what if it's all about getting my own work out there, not knowing what questions it will answer, and if it will even speak to anyone at all?

Creating a “Flow” for the Fine Art practice

I think I need to work to create this flow – this healthy stream with some kind of transactional quality to it. Perhaps I could find some local small charities who may be interested in my work – not for a financial incentive, so that I would “get more work” from it, but simply because the work feels meaningful, and meaningful things need to be moving and flowing.

I wonder who these partners could be, and what my next steps would be in finding them? I wonder if they will be in my new city of Brighton and Hove, or further afield. I wonder if they will be charities, health care bodies, or places of education?

I have so much work I love that I want to create a river with – to donate, to give away, to share.

If you’ve read this and are interested in joining with me, drop me and email and we can talk more!

 A mockup of a print from one of my recent works, Phyllotaxis 2.0. The Original still seeks a home wher it can be loved and appreciated!

I was invited to be part of Bupa's campaign, "Make the Elephant Run", a four-week-long digital event to celebrate Bupa’s achievements at the midway point of their 3x6 company strategy, & to energise all employees to keep going.

The focus was to encourage the team to think on the qualities of the elephant; their resilience, strength and determination to get things done, and so as as part of this campaign, the Bupa offices in central London were transformed into a quasi-savana, with branding and design by Hope Eatock.

Even with this physical edge to the campaign, a digital branding idea like this sometimes needs to be made even more hands-on, and so I was invited to design and then teach a simple Origami Elephant at the Bupa offices to their team, to give a few moments of downtime and creativity!

This is a caption header 6

It was a lot of fun to meet the team on a lunch break at the offices, and people loved the opportunity to get creative, and have a bit of a break from the day-to-day! As an origami artist, I often forget that most people have never really made anything they are that proud of from origami, and so it is always a delight to see the smiling faces and all the finished models arrayed around the offices!

My thanks to Bupa or arranging this fab event!

There are a good number of origami phoenix tutorials on YouTube for various models but I didn’t really connect with the easier ones, and things like Satoshi Kamiya’s masterpiece are obviously far far too much (look if up if you’re not familiar!). Plus I always like to use either traditional or original models to respect other designers’ intellectual rights.

As an extra constraint, I also wanted to design a model that could be folded efficiently from one sheet of A4/Letter paper, and not end up too small a model when completed.

So with these requirements in mind, I started my explorations.

I tried to keep my mind very soft as I tried just walking through a few options. There was some time pressure as I needed to send the client a photo ASAP, but I tried to just notice that stress and keep my mind soft! Eventually, I had the idea of cutting a square from the A4 and using the offcut for the tail – after some experiments it seemed to be a good idea so I explored more and found that by folding the traditional Japanese crane with one little tweak, I could secure a tail, folded from the offcuts folded like a fan, in the back of the model with no glue and complete a really effective model in 30 minutes folding!

 The Japanese crane is symbolic of long life and hope and is often folded in large numbers (1,000s!) by schools and companies in Japan. As such it felt like a fitting model to adapt for this Phoenix and in the workshop (which went well, by the way!) I had a good number of people happily completing the final model – so now there are a flock of Phoenixes all down the West Coast of the US, reminding us that we will Rise Up again one day soon!

As part of my daily work life during Lockdown I am trying to regularly fold a new model from one of my favourite designers – I will write another post on this, but I find that simply making a model from diagrams (not YouTube!) is one the most calming things I can do for my own mental wellbeing.

After folding the model a few times to get a sense of it, I like to think about the structure of the model and how it has been designed. Was there a certain base that the designer used, or certain moves that felt new to me? Perhaps I think in terms of circle packing and tree theory as described by Robert Lang in the epic Origami Design Secrets and work out where each point originates from on the unfolded square. Or I gently consider the structure in terms of the Maekawa model of origami design (folding molecules) that designers like Hideo Komatsu and Fumiaki Kawahata use to such great effect.

Once I have a sense of the model like this, I like to experiment with other ways of folding using the same basic idea – a kind of Mozart-style “variations upon a theme”

This week I have enjoyed folding the Pig from Hideo Komatsu’s amazing book, “Works of Hideo KOMATSU” published by Origami House in Japan (小松英夫作品集・おりがみはうす). I particularly like Komatsu’s models because of the flowing folding sequences, and the very iconic and classic Origami feel of the final forms, with many triangles and quads that could look very mathematical and even dull but seem to take on a life of their own. I highly recommend them if you’ve not folded his models before.

The model begins with a simple pig base, very much like the classic origami pig itself, but with a series of satisfying folds, and soon evolves into a very cute and characteristic and original model.

I was taken by how the back legs and tail work (all using basic 22.5-degree geometry), and so decided to explore other animals that could be made using the “base” that Komatsu offers in this model. It wasn’t long before I had some stubby, stocky legs instead, and from there decided to shorten the whole model and use the excess paper to make a neck and head instead –  the little dog form was born!

Initially, I used 2 colour paper and had a model that resembled an Alsatian puppy, and then for the second version I made it more like a Terrier. I’m very happy with how they turned out, and will get the basic diagrams down in my notebook for future reference.

Origami design often looks like an impossible task and I’m often asked, “How do you come up with the models”, but hopefully this gives you a glimpse into some of the conscious and subconscious thought processes that I use when designing a new model, and maybe give you a bit more confidence in your own explorations.

It’s that time of year again when everything suddenly begins to take on a purply-green hue and things get a little more spoookkkyy! (cue scary music!) so here’s introducing our Halloween Origami Workshops – Horrorgami!

Yes, Halloween is coming up at the end of next month, and though I don’t subscribe to the more gory side of it (can’t stomach zombies in any shape or form!), I rather enjoy a Black Cat or a rather lopsided Jack’o’Lantern.

In fact, when I had a studio in Hackney Wick, one of the local model makers would host a pumpkin carving event each year on a bridge in the area.

There would be people from all over carving lanterns – it was such a fun evening, and they would illuminate the Hackney Wick landscape for a few nights – thanks, Andy!

I’ve sadly moved on from Hackney Wick now (a story for another blog post!), but here is my homage to the scariest day of the year!

Horror-gami Online Halloween Workshops

I led the first Papershake Horrorgami Halloween origami workshop last year and they went down a treat, so here we are for another blast!

I always like to make my workshops as accessible as possible, so we always start with some super simple models to warm up – and Horrorgami is the same!

What we fold in a Halloween Origami Workshop

First, we fold a simple 2 piece Black Cat – if you have a white pencil to hand that’s perfect for getting some features in on black paper, but even if not, this is a super simple cute intro.

(I know, I said I’m not into the more violent side, cute all the way!)

The second model, some Scary Halloween Origami Fangs is the scariest you’ll get here! And I only include them because I am so proud of the model design.

It’s a brand new model for Papershake – it looks similar to the one I taught last year, but is SOOO much easier to fold as is from 2 pieces. This means that even if you don’t have a kit/”proper” origami paper you can still get the 2 colour effect!

There are plenty of other fun models to try too.

Of course a Pumpkin,

And then either a Bat…

…or a more challenging Spider to get your finger around!

Basically, it’s a nice excuse to get the team together if you’re all working remotely, and enjoy something a little different for Halloween this year, so do drop us an email for more information!

I have been running Online Origami Workshops now for over 2 years and have been so surprised and satisfied to see how effective they are at bringing teams together virtually from all over the world. Here are 5 things I often hear from participants as to why they work so well—some of them might surprise you!

1) “I didn’t think about anything else for the whole hour!”

This is one of the most common comments I get, and it thrills me every time!

We live in what’s known as an “Attention Economy” where every second it seems someone else is vying for our attention – a recent study suggests that the average adult’s attention span is now less than 8 seconds, which is less than that of a goldfish! Not good news! (ed, turns out this study was a bit of a myth! See the debunking here!)

I love that for the 60 minutes of the sessions, I can engage with people to the extent that they don’t think about work, family, other commitments, etc. They are simply engaged in the moment, in the “here and now” – a process that is known to reduce stress and promote a healthier lifestyle.

And do you know what’s magic about taking a break from work?

When we get back after a break, it’s often the case that the subconscious has had an opportunity to sort things out “under the hood”, and things often flow so much easier than before. A creative break honestly moves things forward in quite an incredible way!

2) “I feel so Zen!”

I am no Buddhist, let alone a Zen monk, and while I do practice mindfulness in one form, I do not spend hours a day meditating; it’s often hard to find the time in today’s busy lifestyle.

And yet, in these Online Origami Workshops people honestly come away feeling so relaxed! I always focus the sessions on those who have never folded paper before (it’s meant to be fun!) and remind people that there’s zero shame in asking for a hand (a digital one at least!) if things aren’t working.

It thrills me even after over two years to think that, in some strange way, my workshops help people feel more relaxed and hopefully go back into their work and family lives with something of that sense of calm.

3) “I tried Origami before, and it was so hard, but you made it so easy and fun.”

Another classic comment I hear regularly! And I know why!

I’ve been doing Origami since I was 6, and I have grown up with Origami notation in books, so origami diagrams never really phase me – in fact, they were an early introduction to the Japanese language too, which has become another interest of mine.

But they can be confusing and cryptic, and to be honest, YouTube videos are often not that much better – you certainly can’t ask YouTube for help halfway through!

In the models I teach, I know the danger points where things can go wrong, so participants rarely, if ever, don’t manage to complete the models! I love that some people even come away from the sessions with “a brand new hobby!”

4) “My Origami heart has been on my desk for 6 months now!”

This made me happy to hear! I have a little special feature with the heart I teach in the sessions, and it is also a custom model with an incorporated stand so it can pop on the desk, and from some of the comments I get, there it stays!

It can act as a reminder to take a moment for yourself, to think of a friend, to remember the workshop, or just as a moment to raise a slight smile during a busy day – all really valuable things to help us relax and make life a little easier and softer.

5) “I never get to make anything physical anymore, so this was great!”

The final of our 5 comments for this blog post is something I am very passionate about – in today’s world, it’s very easy for all our work to be computer-based, or at the very least, brain-based!

Yet we must be physical and use our bodies as well as our brains. Of course, we now have yoga, and people are very aware of the importance of physical well-being alongside more cerebral work, but I love that in the Online Origami workshops, in the middle of the day, people get an opportunity to create something they can touch, hold, and even give to another!

Even those in creative jobs and roles can still find themselves glued to Photoshop or Illustrator, and so the opportunity for creative people to make something physical often comes as a very welcome break!

So that sums up today’s blog of 5 comments I regularly hear in my workshops. Do drop us an email if you have any thoughts or feedback. – love to hear how you experience creativity in your life!

Who would have thought that in 2022 so many of our interactions would happen online, but since the pandemic, everything has changed for so many companies.

We’re now looking for something new and original, but that also feels personalised and individual to keep our teams engaged and connected online.

Customised Origami Workshops

This is where our customised Origami Workshops come in and offer a brand new experience of connecting and building team online – Not only do you get to fold a range of fun and engaging models as per our normal workshops, but we work hard to create new and fresh models related directly to your company.

One of the fun challenges in hosting Online Origami Workshops is how to structure and plan a session. For those who are new to Origami, it can be intimidating to go straight into difficult models, so I like to build the sessions up from super simple intro models to those that are a little more challenging. I also give extra challenges to those who are storming ahead, so that I can keep everyone engaged.

When it comes to customised workshops, I have to initially design or pick a model that would work well for the brand, but then also work out how to teach it in such a way that no one gets left behind.

Logos are particularly difficult, and I love the challenge of designing Origami versions of them for my clients!

These strawberries and apples were a lot of fun to teach – they are classic models, but then with the addition of the leaf and a few other tweaks, they felt very fresh and a lot of fun in our workshop with an Online Grocery Delivery company.

A word from our client for this event:

"Michael was awesome! He was a pleasure to work with from start to finish. He made it easy to book and create a great experience for our team. He’s clearly extremely knowledgeable about origami but is also very skilled in leading virtual events. I felt like his ability to watch the group and move at a pace that worked for everyone was great. I’d highly recommend booking Papershake for your next event"

I love to keep my Online Origami Workshops fresh and up to date, and really like to personalise them where I can, so I designed some super fun Origami rings for Pride Month 2021!

Here’s my favourite one, folded from 8 pieces of paper.

I love how the (almost) rectangular bands are a bit like the stripes from the Pride Flag, and also how the colours mix up through the model.

Of course the Traditional Gay Pride flag has only 6 colours, but there are now over 30 different flags you can explore with loads of different colour combinations!

Infact, Philadelphia added brown and black at the top of their flag in 2017 to spotlight the importance of including queer people of color in the LGBTQ+ community, so that should be my next version!

I’ll try to give it a go before the end of the Summer and update on here!

Michael

Update: I didn’t have any brown paper, but did an Black and White one – I’ll get some brown asap and update v2.2!