I was experimenting with some damp Wenzhou paper while at the monthly Papermakers meeting, and decided to spritz it with blue, then green and finally black acrylic ink. Because the paper was damp, these patches of sprayed pigment wicked together in delightfully soft and cloudy ways.

After methyl cellulose treating the sheet, I decided I needed a dragon to fold it into, so thought of Kade Chan’s most recently published diagram – Frost Dragon.

Now the purists among you will notice this beastie has hind legs, and claws at the apex of each wing – technically this makes this a Wyvern as opposed to a Dragon proper, but the world of “western” dragons is confused at best so I will move on.

The paper was 45cm square, in retrospect I could have thrown a more complicated dragon at it, but I did not want to risk wasting the beautiful paper – that said I wanted to fold a model I had not yet folded (hence the blog number 1206). Kade Chan, as a designer, creates fairly simple models, but they are fun to fold so I thought “Why not?”

I have folded his earlier dragons and, at the time, thought they were pretty “dragony”, but this design, like his earlier designs, feels a little clunky in proportion and level of detail. The wings on this Frost Dragon are lovely, the feet are nice and complicated and the claws remind me of his Werewolf claws. The body and tail are (at least on the diagram) fairly basic – I decided to texture them up a bit, adding pleats into the tail and some extra layering through the body.

The fold sequence, detailed in the book “New Generation of Origami”, curated by Makoto Yamaguchi, is pretty straight forward, the only really challenging stage is the teasing out of the toes on the legs – this is however, almost a carbon copy of ancient dragon toes so familiar to me.

The difficulty photographing such models made out of dark paper is … well … they do not look very impressive in the photos. I am part of an origami community that gives “likes” to beautiful looking models (sometimes over complex, well folded but poorly photographed ones) so I am in no doubt there will be passing interest there, but I do like how the paper elevates the model, the variegation adds interest and texture to the layers.

I had forgotten how wonderful it is to fold with nice thin tough paper – I have a huge roll of Wenzhou but have barely used any of it – I must change that now i have a colouring method I can control and whose results I love.