The post title reminds me of the punchline of a favourite joke: “What does a 10 tonne parrot say?”:
This is a “Diatryma gigantea” (aka “Gastronis”) skeleton, designed by Mase Eiichiro based on fossil records. In real life this beastie would have been scary indeed.
Nicknamed “murder bird”, it seems paelontologists are divided as to whether it was a herbivore, carnivore or omnivore – it was HUUUGE – like 7ft tall, and the musculature marks around the beak suggest it had a titanic bite. Curiously it has no other “predator” characteristics – like a hook at the end of the beak or shredding talons on it’s feet, making it a confusing snarly. The first skeletal reconstruction of fossil remains happened in the early 1920s, and the result looked more like a 9ft emu (seems they had parts of a number of different animals in the one model).
For those up to date with “The Mandolorean”, the last episode reveal was “baby yoda’s” name – turns out it was “Grogu”:
Although loosely a space western, Mando is largely cutie Grogu and as many Star Wars references as is possible to fit into a loose plot (my opinion).
Sebastien Limet designed a 2-part Grogu and published video tutorial on his Fakebook account – head and body are separate (I cheated and glued mine together – ssshhh!). The next day he did the same for a Mandalorian helmet – I made mine a little goth. More eye candy follows…
World Origami Days is a period end October-beginning November that is an international celebration of Origami. I decided to try a super complex model (fold until it fails) and successfully folded Satoshi Kamiya’s “Divine Dragon (Bahamut)” on the first attempt:
Rarely does a first fold work out but I kept folding and it did, much to my surprise and delight. The fold sequence is particularly punishing and describes a bit of an enigma of a model – the balance between paper thinness and size. I chose 80gsm 100cm square Kraft paper and at this size/thickness it was tough going in places indeed. The body and legs are incredibly thick compared to the single layer wings – a bit of a puzzle if you wanted to fold it small.
A “Bahamut” is a monster from the “Final Fantasy” franchise, and is an odd mix of a lizard, dragon, Godzilla…thing.
The detail here is terrifying. Thick, muscular 4-toed feet, thick dragonny tail, chest sporting a 6 pack (make that a whole slab), arms with 4 claws, complex and snarly horned head and glorious wings with an extra set of hands atop them – quite a formidable beastie.
This fold took me the best part of the weekend to complete, and I used a little glue (shhhh!) to tidy gaping seams and a little MC to stabilise his (? only they would know the gender) posture and basic body morphology.
If I were to fold this again I would use thinner prettier paper, but there are sections where front and back are visible, so the model is not really suited to duo paper – perhaps double tissue or unryu. I had forgotten how satisfying Satoshi Kamiya models are to fold, and how wonderful it is to just get lost in the folding process (I took no progress pics, soz) – it was terrific paper-based therapy. There are so many complex techniques here to isolate and separate body elements, genius design indeed.
I had a 12cm square of thin crisp Kraft and decided to try the Riccardo Foschi CP for his gecko. This required a 32 square grid, making resultant pleats 4mm or less each:
I figured this was a good test of my accuracy, and found it quite relaxing but fiddly with my nerve-damaged hands. I am working on my CP deciphering skills, and this seemed quite straight forward.
Western dragons are an attempt to make sense of a mythical flying beast – the whole wing-thing appears necessary, and the morphology is usually based on a giant lizard:
This is a test fold of Redpaper’s “Western Dragon”, well my rendering of it at least, from his forthcoming book.
I have taken liberties, having folded it a couple of times to try and work out the most dense parts of the design, and required sheet size.