Joel Cooper, a Lawrence artist specializing in origami, draws inspiration for his tessellations from Islamic designs. Cooper will join more than 140 other artists selling work on Sunday at the annual Art in the Park in South Park.

Lawrence artist Joel Cooper holds one of his miniature origami pieces in his fingers.

All Joel Cooper needs to make art is a piece of paper.

Hundreds of folds later, and he ends up with complex geometric shapes, stars and even faces.

“That’s basically what I do,” the Lawrence artist says. “I fold paper.”

But that description might be deceptively simple.

Cooper specializes in origami and uses tessellations as his inspiration. To understand what a tessellation is, just think of a big puzzle. The pieces of the puzzle can be any shape and are usually uniform throughout. They fit directly together, without any gaps.

Creating his three-dimensional, multicolored artworks can be tedious.

“If I have it all planned out ahead of time,” Cooper says, “it might take three or four days (to construct a piece).”

In some of his work, Cooper uses translucent paper so that when light shines through, the viewer sees the contrast between the colors and shapes within the tessellation.

“I just like to make things,” he says. “I like to have ideas and see them realized.”

Cooper will join more than 140 other artists at the 46th annual Art in the Park on Sunday in South Park. The event is sponsored by the Lawrence Art Guild.

“This is our biggest fundraiser of the year,” says Linda Baranski, guild president.

Applicants submit digital images or slides of their work, plus a design of their booth setup, and guild members select applicants based on specific guidelines.

“All artwork or photography must be made by the artist,” Baranski says. “Nothing can be made with patterns or molds.”

Cooper, the origami artist, certainly works with patterns, but they’re patterns of his own invention. A native of San Francisco, he graduated in 1992 from Kansas University with a bachelor’s degree in sculpture.

He found a hobby in origami when he was about 12 years old. Nowadays, he can’t just sit down and fold a piece of paper a couple of times.

He usually starts a project by sketching a design onto scrap paper. Then he prefolds a piece of paper into a triangular grid and starts constructing the actual design.

Cooper admits it sounds complicated, but he hopes people enjoy the end results.

“I don’t really try to explain what I do,” he says. “I encourage people to look at it.”