THE BASS PLAYER

The seventh dwarf in my Music Band is the tallest with his very long hat. Besides, he has the biggest instrument until now. He is standing straight, gently touching the bass strings. He is here:

And here you have Joisel's bass player in the Zaragoza Exhibition in 2013:

Joisel's bass player in the Zaragoza Exhibition in 2013

The model is folded from the same base than the violinist that I already presented in this blog, the dwarf with diamonds:

In this case I have used a slightly bigger paper, the maximum I could get from the piece of Kozo paper I had: 64x64cm. The total height of the model is 27 cm. I have used a long vertical hat to make it as tall as possible so that it looks over the instrument. Compared to the violinist the model is much more slender. Together with the long hat, I used long legs. Note how I used smaller feet than in the violinist and no knees at all to lengthen the legs. They are small details that make two similar models look very different.

The instrument, a bass, is difficult to classify. A bass may refer to different instruments, none of them exactly the same as the origami model I have folded. However, the similarities with Joisel's bass and the beauty of the model made me select it for my musician.

In the following images from Wikipedia you can see some of the instruments that are called basses. I like to imagine the origami model like a mixture between the bass violin or cello and the acoustic bass guitar:

Acoustic bass guitar

Bass guitar

Bass violin

In the origami world there have already been several bass designs. I have found three related to Joisel's model:

The first one, with very little documentation appears in the Spanish Origami Association (AEP) forum:

Photograph published by 'zenutrio' in the AEP forum

CP draft showing the bass body (it doesn't appear in the forum any more but I think it matches the previous model)

The second one is the model designed and released by Ricardo Montecinos in his flickr page:

And the third one, my option, has been designed and published by Alexander Kurth. Alexander is a very talented young german origami artist. Here are some links to his flickr,  Facebook and Youtube channel. Enjoy his creations. In his Youtube channel he has a videodiagram showing step by step how to fold the bass:

I have drawn his bass CP to illustrate the design:

It is a 3x1 box pleating design. It uses a 48x16 grid. The body is on the left and the arm on the right. I folded my model from a 41x13.3 cm kozo paper painted with brown water colour. The most beautiful part of this model is probably the central hole in the body. You can see the detail in the model I folded:

Back

Front

The only problem I found in Alexander's model was that it is back opened. As I have explained in other posts, my idea when folding these musicians was to make them completely three dimensional. Until now I had succeeded in all the models except in the violin that has an open back. However Alex's bass is relatively easy to close. As you can see in the upper photograph, the sides of the body have several layer of paper. It is simple to unfold and stretch them to form the flat back of the instrument. The only drawback is that the process shortens the legs but, who cares how long are those legs?

Let us see several pics of the process: 

And the model is completely closed:

Finally, I show a few photographs of the model from different points of view:

Face detail

THE VIOLIN

When I decided to fold my second Joisel's dwarf  I chose the violinist because it is one of my favourite instruments and also because of the dynamism it could give the model. As always, the first step was investigating and selecting a proper model. As far as I know, Joisel didn’t leave instructions for the violin. I only found a CP by Jorge Gracia (zenutrio), published in the AEP internet forum:

The next option I found was Leo Lai’s cello. Both the CP and the final model can be found in his flickr page. If you don’t know it, it is well worth a visit. 

Leo Lai's cello

When I analysed the CP I discovered a great design. The bottom of the paper is used to form the cello’s body. The upper part is used to form the strings, neck and scroll of the instrument. It is folded accordion like and then folded down to lay on the body using the string of diamonds in the middle of the paper. This last fold also produces the colour change of the strings, neck and scroll.  

You can see it here in a very preliminary fold I made to see how the CP worked:

The top area is folded accordion like

The top of the paper is folded over the bottom using the line of diamonds

The final model, with a short neck, but useful to learn the folding procedure 

At this point of my investigation I had two options:

• Trying to fold the original model by Joisel
• Modifying Leo Lai’s design to lenghten the neck and reduce the number of strings from 8 to 4 turning the cello into a violin (although in Leo Lai's folded model you can only see 4 strings, when you fold the published CP you get 8) 

To my delight I found that just a few days before, a wonderful violin design by Gen Hagiwara had been published in the 143th number of the Tanteidan Magazine.

The concept behind this model is the same as in the cello, a long stripe of paper, the bottom to form the body and the top to form the strings, neck and scroll. I only had to choose the proper size of paper (22x5,5 cm), paint it with brown and black water colour and fold it.

My final violin

Although Gen Hagiwara’s violin is beautiful I couldn’t stop thinking about Joisel’s one. So I decided to give it a try. Using Jorge Gracia’s CP I made some small changes, added some detail and ended up with this CP:

Here you can see a simple photo diagram to help you fold the CP as well as a final photo with the violin and the dwarf:

And as a final reflection, I want to give some ideas on how to improve the design even more. The three models, Joisel and Hagiwara’s violins and Leo Lai’s cello are opened.

The back of the violin is hollow

How could a closed violin be designed? A possible solution could be to use a wider stripe so that after folding the body we had more paper left. This paper could be folded to form the back of the violin. I may try it one day if nobody does it before. The model would be spectacular, at least the image of the model I have in my mind!!!!

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19th may -2014

A few days after I released this post an origami friend from Madrid sent me two Eric Joisel's violin CPs. We think that they were on his web. I leave them here as a curiosity. They are very, very similar to the ones I presented in my post. The model in the second photography is simply spectacular.