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.