Photo: Qiao Chang

Qiao Chang of SmugMug is a commercial photographer who creates origami figures as a hobby. One of her works takes the form of a mathematical puzzle called a Soma cube:

A solid dissection puzzle invented by Piet Hein during a lecture on Quantum Mechanics by Werner Heisenberg. There are seven soma pieces composed of all the irregular face-joined cubes (polycubes) with <=4 cubes. The object is to assemble the pieces into a cube. There are 240 essentially distinct ways of doing so (Beeler 1972, Berlekamp et al. 1982), as first enumerated one rainy afternoon in 1961 by J. H. Conway and Mike Guy.

Link via GearFuse | Soma Cube Explanation

I’m a big fan of papercraft artist Yumiko Matsui (featured before on Neatorama here) – so it was a pleasant surprise to hear from her about this Neatoramabot papercraft sculpture. Ain’t he cute?

If you haven’t seen Yumiko’s artwork before, you owe it to yourself to check it out: she sculpts fantastic and colorful dioramas as well as miniature characters out of paper. The level of details is simply superb (for example, in her Summer Festival series, check out the Japanese pancake stand)

Best of all, I hear she’s coming to the United States! Here’s Yumiko’s online art gallery: Link

Junior Fritz Jacquet is a paper artist unlike any other: his medium of choice is the cardboard core of a toilet paper roll!

Village of Joy has the gallery – via Reality Carnival | Junior’s website (no links, strangely) and portfolio (PDF)

Origami, the age-old discipline of folding paper into amazing figures, has its own masters, and as this post demonstrates, these geniuses can truly transform paper into any form they desire.

Origami – the traditional Japanese art of paper folding – is something that a geek could really get into. It’s all about visual math, and problem-solving, but with that artistic nuance as well. The origami artists below came up with some very cool designs, which we can definitely appreciate – so check them out!

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Geeksaresexy.

Only the geekiest of papercraft projects made the cut for this excellent list from oobject. Take a look at what happened when geeks get their hands on construction paper:

Whether a novice or a paper-folding master, papercraft is a hobby that anyone can enjoy. It involves printing out a custom schematic with instructions and folding the paper to create a unique work of art. The papercraft you see here keep central with the theme of geekiness and quite possibly, nerdiness.

Link

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by vveneziani.

The Origami Crane Lamp is a chandelier by Michele Varian, a New York-based fashion designer and interior decorator. It measures 58″ long is lit fluorescently.

Link via Nerd Approved

Kusudama is an ancient Japanese form of paper folding which is still practiced today.  As time passed the form evolved in to something that looks similar to origami but has a very different set of rules.

Quazen has some great pictures of both Kusudama and modular origami, into which it evolved:

The form of Kusudama goes back to before written history. The general consensus is that they were used to hold bunches of herbs or flowers as urban culture
took hold. With urbanization the desire for objects with both utility and beauty took greater hold. Before this the plants would have been hung on their own and the kusudama evolved as an aesthetically pleasing receptacle for both potpourri and incense.

Link – via webphemera

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by taliesyn30.

Link

Yumiko Matsui is a Japanese artist specializing in fantastic dioramas made out of paper. This one is of the Dotonbori Street in Osaka:

Dotonbori is one of Osaka’s main shopping areas and entertainment districts, and is also known as a food destination. It is a popular tourist destination. It is famous for big cheesy neon signs on the street. Those signs become part of the culture of Osaka. Dotonbori street gets busier at night because of the lights.

Check out the gallery here: Link – Thanks Yumiko!