According to TED.com: “Robert Lang is a pioneer of the newest kind of origami — using math and engineering principles to fold mind-blowingly intricate designs that are beautiful and, sometimes, very useful.”
“Origami, as Robert Lang describes it, is simple: “You take a creature, you combine it with a square, and you get an origami figure.” But Lang’s own description belies the technicality of his art; indeed, his creations inspire awe by sheer force of their intricacy. His repertoire includes a snake with one thousand scales, a two-foot-tall allosaurus skeleton, and a perfect replica of a Black Forest cuckoo clock. Each work is the result of software (which Lang himself pioneered) that manipulates thousands of mathematical calculations in the production of a “folding map” of a single creature.”
“The marriage of mathematics and origami harkens back to Lang’s own childhood. As a first-grader, Lang proved far too clever for elementary mathematics and quickly became bored, prompting his teacher to give him a book on origami. His acuity for mathematics would lead him to become a physicist at the California Institute of Technology, and the owner of nearly fifty patents on lasers and optoelectronics. Now a professional origami master, Lang practices his craft as both artist and engineer, one day folding the smallest of insects and the next the largest of space-bound telescope lenses.”
Robert Lang: The math and magic of origami
For those of you not familiar with TED Talks here is a brief summery from www.ted.com: “TED is a small nonprofit devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading. It started out (in 1984) as a conference bringing together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm Springs each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Oxford UK each summer — TED includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize”
Today’s tutorial by mandalanomadess is “Making Art with Nature, Acorn and Oak Leaf Mandala.” Here is what she has to say about this video:
“Today I ventured out not planning to make a mandala necessarily, but feeling the impulse to go “nature paint shopping” with the various temptations of fall leaves and acorns covering the oak forest landscape where I am presently located.”
Enjoy this example of using natural materials to create mandalas.
Making Art with Nature, Acorn and Oak Leaf Mandala by mandalanomadess
To learn more about these nature mandalas go to:
http://www.mandalanomadess.com – Mandala Nomadess is a “nomadic mandala maker” creating mandala art using natural objects found in nature as her art medium. This is meditation, playtime and art all rolled into one… traveling to the ocean, forests, deserts and rivers of California, making mandalas and loving planet earth one mandala at a time.
According to 
To learn more about these nature mandalas go to: