Sunday, February 1, 2015

Etna kusudama cube



A variation on Etna Kusudama by Maria Sinayskaya.  A guitar pick shown for scale.

Here I show very small model I created with a particular purpose in mind.  I wanted to use an "aro flag" coloring scheme, which includes black, gray, yellow, light green, and dark green.  The trouble is, that's five colors, and five is an odd number.

The Etna Kusudama uses edge-based modules.  It's recommended that you make 30 of them and make an icosahedron.  Each face of the icosahedron will consist of a triangular pyramid with an opening at the tip.  An icosahedron is a nice shape to make because there exists a symmetric way to color 30 edges with five colors.

However, edge-based modules can frequently be connected in a variety of ways.  Here I connected 12 edges into a cube.  There exists a symmetric way to color the 12 edges with four colors.  The fifth color... is inside.

Yep, I just stuck a plain cube in there!  It's made of silver foil.  As a bonus, it makes the model more structurally sound.

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