I am constantly surprised what you can do with the classic bird base:
This is Peter Buchanan-Symons’ “Loch Ness Monster”, a fascinating exercise in colour change and tight accordion pleating that takes the points of a bird base (traditionally 2 wings, a head and a tail) and manipulates them to make 4 stickey-uppey colour-changed flaps that are then bent to produce a familiar outline.
This is a simple model from a forthcoming book “Folding Fantasy Volume 1” that I helped edit – some lovely challenges therein.
One of the things I am doing more and more is being involved in the editing of pre-publish origami books. I was approached by Peter Buchan-Symons on his forthcoming book “Fantasy Origami”:
I have folded many of his models testing as I check sequences, but seriously love this little guy – such a clever use of paper.
I folded this little dragon on a 21cm duo Tuttle print (although it is suggested that the first fold should be 25cm+) and the sequence is wonderful, complex and exacting.
Francesco Massimo sent me a diagram, out of the blue, for me to try – such an honour:
I have labelled it a “Danger Noodle” – it is an Eastern Dragon, but it looks way too playful to be dangerous.
Folded as a set of nested rabbit-ears straddling a central pleated gusset, the structure is fairly simple but has the basic morphology correct. I am sure, with some re-engineering, one could make the rear legs a little longer and the head more complex, but as a basic eastern dragon it is a cutie.
It is not every day you open your email and find a gift from a design legend. Friday Francesco Massimo sent me the diagrams for his Western Dragon, and I knew what I would be folding this weekend:
Having folded many dragons (western and not), I was keen to explore the morphology and layer management of this new model, and pretty soon realised paper selection is REALLY important for success with this model.
Essentially a “birdbase”, 2 structured have been grafted on (a Lang “KNL”-style dragon head, and a luscious set of wings), meaning that the “legs” would emerge from the centre of a tangle near the middle of the sheet, accumulating layers as they were formed.
I decided to fold a maquette from thin crispy Kraft paper first – there were LOTS of baffling manipulations and I did not feel confident to risk nice paper on a first fold. In wrestling with the maquette, I “made good” the wing connection and body trimming, learned about initial angles of things like the neck (deciding I did not like the designed angle, changing it in my final fold), and the sequence for the collapse of the head – the pre-creasing strategy is prone to gross inaccuracies that impact the look and sit of the features, so adopted more of a CP mentality when I knew what was being used for what.
Looking for a model to welcome in the new year, and also to further my Crease Pattern solving ability, I hoped this model would serve both purposes:
Part of a book I have helped edit prior to publishing, this is 1ctzH8jm0N2’s “Bone Dragon”, a CP and photodiagram sequence from the forthcoming book “Ori-Fancy 6”.
I started with a 90cm square, I divided into a 32 grid, then located the required diagonals, then begin allocating mountain and valley orientation to the creases before attempting the collapse.
There are lots of details here, and the initial collapse generates most of them – I buggered up the head collapse (rather I found the intricate point in point structure that would eventually become the horns too hard to do initially) but found it easy to do post-collapse, and was initially flummoxed by the feet structure until I realised a series of sinks needed to be closed-sinked, and another set needed to be open-sinks (hopefully this will be made clear in the final photo diagram annotations).
The body ends up being 30+ layers, making the necessary crimping for shaping really difficult with thick paper (I used natural Kraft paper) – there is a nice “bulk” to the body, and the body feels solid – thinner paper would make shaping less torturous.
