Thursday, April 21, 2011

Another Icosahedron


Here's another of my spheres that I call offset icosahedrons. It's a bit bigger, 3.5" in diameter, where the 1st one was around 3". Also I made the change I was talking about earlier. The end faces (8 beads) of each strip of cubes is a side face in one of the other, different colored strips, so they share a whole face. Each strip is added on to the adjoining ones as if the whole thing were a flat piece. It's just when you pull 5 strips together into a pentagon that you force a curve into the shape. Doing it this way made the piece firmer, so I could make it bigger. Each strip of cubes is 8 cubes long, where the other sphere used strips of 6 cubes.
One thing I forgot to mention that worked out really well, in both balls, was that I found that if I used 5 colors I could arrange them so that I never had 2 of the same color next to one another.
Seems like now I have to do something asymmetrical. Every time I try to work my way out of symmetry, I find myself coming back to it. Actually I like symmetry too, and I think you probably have to work out the symmetry of a structure before you can play around with it, and do something asymmetrical.

8 comments:

  1. Another awesome icosahedron! I like the more-offsetness of this one, if that makes any sense. I also like how you've coordinated the colors on both of them for even color distribution. It's a color strategy I see in origami pretty frequently, but not as much in beadwork (which I'm admittedly guilty of myself).

    Thanks for answering my questions about your previous icosahedron as well. Best of luck with something asymmetrical; I understand your tendency to work in symmetry. I have a hard time with asymmetry too.

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  2. Love these. So sculptural! Can't wait to see (and fondle) it in person. Colors and contrast are good too.

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  3. This is definitely my favorite of the three. The extra cubes make the lines curve beautifully, and the colors are much more dazzling. Well done. What a puzzle it must be to assemble one of these. Good luck with the asymmetry quest. I find it much more challenging to do well than to just go for symmetric.

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  4. These are so great. When you say cube, do you mean the units in cubic RAW?

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  5. Beautiful! Just stunning.

    The arrangement of colors actually encodes the symmetries of the icosahedron in a deep way. I found this coloring playing around with modular origami in college (I was aiming for the same five-color goal as you), and when I showed it to one of my math professors, he said, "Oh, you colored it right!" Mine wasn't anywhere near as gorgeous as yours.

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    1. I have a couple of books on modular origami. I don't actually do origami, but the geometry is so similar to what I do with beads that I get ideas.

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  6. By the way, I enjoyed your facebook page. I have an article stashed away on my computer with pictures and directions for a Lorenz manifold, but I know I'll never get to it.
    Your page made me start to rethink my facebook plan, which has been to only have actual friends as facebook friends. There's so much I haven't figured out about facebook, and it seems it's so easy to get totally bogged down in looking at posts, so I've just mostly avoided it.
    Actually, maybe you can explain something for me. In the past 2 days, I've gotten hundreds of visits to my blog, almost all from facebook and almost all to this 4 year old blog post. As you were one of them, I thought you might know how this happened.

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  7. Скажите есть ли мастер классы для создания таких изделий

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