More foldforming fun

I was in the studio the other day playing around with a different type of foldforming: line folds. Line folds are ways to make raised lines on sheet; on the one side, it looks like square wire has been soldered to the sheet, and there's a groove or channel (depending on the depth of the fold) on the other side. They can also be made narrower at one end and wider at the other. They're a lot like pintucks, really.

Line folds can be made the full length or width of the sheet or can take up only part of the sheet, and they can overlap.

So here are some practice line fold pictures:

Simple line folds that overlap, from the top.

The same simple line folds, from the other side. You can see the grooves that these lines make. You might notice different colours showing up on this side; some artists make these colours happen deliberately. It's a pretty effect.

Two short full-length line folds and one that's centred on the sheet. It isn't terribly good; when I made the fold I hammered too much and ended up pinching some of it out, making it uneven and a little wonky.

My centred line fold, which looks a little wonky from this side. But look how lovely that fold on the left is!

The center fold is a basic line fold and the two on the right and left are variable width folds. The one on the right worked out really well; see how the line looks so sharp at the top and more like a bump at the bottom? The one on the left is ok but it's too sharp at the bottom.

So... I don't know why this picture is rotated but I'm leaving it as-is. The variable fold that was on the right above is now on the bottom. I could probably flatten these out even more.

Because line folds have a fold (pintuck) on one side and a groove on the other and can be made variable width, they remind me of the veins on leaves. So I started playing around to see whether or not I could make some things that sort of look like leaves. Here are my attempts.

So it's possible to make folds that stop at other folds, and that's what I've done here. I know it's a bit hard to see, but what I did here was make the line folds, texture the piece, and cut it out. The effect is ok but not great because the texturing with the hammer made the folds wonky.

The back side of the folds (which, if this was a real leaf, would be the front side, and the folds would all stop short of the edge and would be slightly wider towards the bottom or intersection point).

Here I tried making the line fold first and then texturing it. The texture looks fine but while texturing, the piece distorted and made the line fold wonky at the bottom. If it hadn't folded over and I could have centred it when I hammered it open, it might have made a nice-looking fold.

As you can see, the groove part looks just fine - it's the other side that doesn't look so good. I actually love the colours that I got on this side when I annealed this piece.

So then I tried texturing first and then making my fold. Here's the textured piece; the texturing affected the shape of this piece (it was originally much squarer)

Here's the finial product, from the top, with a variable line fold. I think it worked out pretty well, although the line should stop short of the end. I like the texture.

Here's the leaf from the bottom, after pickling. It worked out pretty well, I think.