Written
as part of a thread in the Origami Forum, this was my attempt to answer a question
about the difficulty of folding minimally acceptable realistic 3D female faces
using origami methods. I describe
my own efforts in this direction.
There are at least
three main problems for using origami for sculpting female faces. First,
women's faces are 'neotonous' or more childlike as adults; and youthful faces
are ALSO harder to make from folded paper (why?). Second, being the fairer sex
means--just as it does by the way for male birds--that there is greater
reliance on strong contrasts of color or texture: e.g. dark hair, eyebrows, and
lips, set off by regions of skin that must be quite smooth or differently
colored for contrast. Flashing eyes and eyelashes too are desirable, as perhaps
are white teeth. (As with many bird species and for quite similar reasons there
are exactly TWO dominant contrasting colors, plus a third and/or fourth color
of softer contrast.) All this is harder to achieve in origami without color
changes and those bring in problems of their own—leaving aside even the
fact that there is only one color for each side of the paper. (Contrast is
likewise a problem for traditional sculpture that uses single-colored
materials, but the tradition has had 30,000 years to work out its rather narrow
band of solutions. The tradition for instance has few happy answers to the
problem of the eye's colored iris.)
Finally, the most intuitive way of making faces is the 'transverse-line'
method: a pleat across the sheet from which each protruding feature is pulled.
But female faces turn out to be VERY sensitive to those extra lines about the
nose and mouth, or to the slightest hint of roughness of texture between the
two.
My first experiments
with human faces were made in about 1987. I then used the transverse-line
method without much thought. But as that work was not in paper but in metal
foil--aluminum at first, copper later on--the lines were hidden among the foil
crumples. (Much of the paper mask-work of today does something similar, hiding
the unnatural lines in a larger lattice of lines.) Back in the 1980s and early
90s, my faces were almost all male. They were also mostly bearded, to avoid
having to deal with the problem of properly forming a chin.
It is my impression that
the various people around the world who worked on sculptural faces over the
past 15 years have likewise independently begun from transverse lines---and that male (and even
bearded) figures are disproportionately represented.
When I came back to
paper-folding in 2004, transverse lines seemed too limiting; and in any case I
went through a minimalist phase, trying to see how few hard folds really were
needed to make familiar objects. I spent two full months on noses alone…. In other months I built up a repertoire
of eyes, chins, hairlines, hair styles, hats, necks, shoulders, chests; I'm
still struggling to expand an expressive range that is horribly limited.
Anyway, ONE minimalist way of making the pyramid of the nose leaves a single,
vertical line descending through the base of the nose and through the chin. It
turns out that this line, though entirely unnatural, is not visually
bothersome; even better, it solves one of the problems of making female faces.
For there are no longer distracting horizontal folds around the nose or mouth
to suggest wrinkles or a mustache.
Strangely,
Modigliani---who doesn't NEED such a line---introduces one! in a few of his
sculptures and paintings of women's heads:
There is a certain
comfort to this, Modigliani being the artist who knows the most about women
(women's skin, especially).
So that was one
hurdle over with. Another was hair. In an earlier post BShuval suggested there
was a difficulty in making hair from folded paper; I replied that it isn't that
there are no good solutions--in fact there are many--but it takes time to think
of them, to simplify them. It may be worth expanding on this a little.
Hair has been a
problem for traditional, solid sculpture as well; and many elegant solutions
have accumulated by now. But very few of these, one observes, represent hair as
flat, which is how it is on many
(most?) people's heads; that's because "curls" or at least a thick texture is about the only way
to represent the color-change of hair without using color.
In origami, a
natural sequence of design-thinking is this: One starts with a freeform rounded
crumple; moves past it either to a controlled crumple, that is to drawn lines;
or to systematic rounded forms, which for a while I thought was limited to
pleats:
Pleat folding, of
the sort made famous by Paul Jackson, gives a means of curving paper in two
directions at once--which is exactly what one wants for the top of a
head--while giving that dome a regular or continuously-changing shadowy
texture.
Pleats are an
interesting solution but I immediately wanted to know if there were others.
(Pleats give to human heads a familiar origami look that one may at times
want get away from.) It
nevertheless took me over a year to come up with anything else; and that
happened only in the context of thinking systematically about tessellations and
curvature. I've written about this
at length elsewhere,
so will say here only that there is a certain amount of fun you can have with
curving tessellations.
The first full,
artistic result of this line of thought was Ernestine. She also has a less illustrious younger
sister, Molly.
But one ought not
conclude from all this that a textured head is the only or even the best way to
represent hair in origami. The
truth is that one can do more or less what one wants—from simple fan pleating to more exotic treatments.
Besides hair---there
are, of course, a host of tiny details that go into making a female face, that
one isn't aware of until one tries one's hand. Eye-slits, for instance--it is my
impression that these have to be aligned on a flatter frontal plane than is the
case with men. The eyes themselves
are best made sinuous rather than oval. A more triangular head often is better
than a more rectangular or even a round one. But there are no firm rules here;
and the details really are quite subtle. When I keep in mind that a woman
though already equipped with what God has given her may still spend hours in
front of a mirror before going out just to get her looks 'feminine' enough---I
don't get too discouraged when it doesn't go easily for me either.
It's an interesting
fact (suggested I believe by mleonard) that when a sculpture of a woman's face
comes off badly, the result, especially in origami, is variously described as
'more masculine' and as 'older'. I
suppose this has to do with the neotony mentioned above. But it's worth reviewing what age does
to a face. Skin quality alters. Hair turns grey or loses luster and hairlines
recede. The shine in the eye disappears. Jowls tend to fill out—sculpting
with origami makes this quite clear, since unlike solid sculpture it is easy
enough to twist a surface and loosen or tighten a jaw-line---adding or taking
off years with a flex. Then there's the issue of soft shadows, noted in another thread:
those in the hollow of the cheek, or just above or to the side of the eyes
(making them 'smoky'). Even on women who keep their beauty these very slight concavities
either sharpen and become haggard with age or fill with flesh and get lost.
Here for instance, modeling those shadows as much as the Tiffany's jewelry
she's holding, and still very much in her prime, is the lovely and talented Scarlett Johansen.
But
the most crucial youth/age difference is the one I mentioned at the outset,
and it has very much of a bearing
on origami: In youth, each of the prominent features (eyes, eyebrows, nostrils,
lips)appears as a small island of strong color surrounded by a sea of smooth,
differently colored or differently textured skin. In age, these islands get
linked by furrows—that is, by fold lines. Now, it is usually rather
difficult to make protruding features in origami without putting in lines that
cut all the way across a surface; but this is just what we're being asked to do
here! The call for simplicity in paperfolding—for the absolute minimum
number of clean folds—which is ever present if rarely heeded in the work
done today, becomes an acute
necessity for the task of making a beautiful face. Such faces are rare in our
world. It seems that by some odd conjunction, the difficulty posed for us in
origami is being matched by a difficulty confronting nature herself.
Saadya
Sternberg
December,
2005
Beersheva,
Israel
