1028: Montroll’s Butterfly

Flipping through “Bugs and Birds in Origami” by John Montroll one gains an appreciation for the clear design skills on show:

Montroll's butterfly

This is Montroll’s “Butterfly” – published in 2001, representing ‘old school’ design, the resultant model is lovely, efficiently uses paper and is morphologically pretty accurate – all this without the hundreds of instructions typical of more modern designs.

Montroll's butterfly views

Folded from a 30cm square of Daiso unryu (do they still make this? i have not been able to buy it for years), the work to isolate legs and antennae is delicious (if requiring precision) folding, and overall is a fun sequence minimally diagrammed.

Montroll's butterfly scale

There are a few other bugs in this book worthy of consideration as doing genuinely innovative things to achieve point isolation – must give them a bend. One thing I have noticed is these designs do not really cater for the medium – that is, impossibly thin paper makes these folds possible with accuracy – thicker paper pushes out landmarks and layers in ugly and difficult to control ways – a curse of many modern super complex designs.

Happy with this flutterby however.

2 thoughts on “1028: Montroll’s Butterfly

  1. I have noticed a slight resurgence in Montroll’s work. His impact on Origami is huge! little known fact- his first book Origami for the Enthusiast published in 1979, was the first origami book ever published where every model was out of a single square.

    1. Harry, I agree – with the proliferation of teen box pleating designers these days we often lose sight of the fact that we stand on the shoulders of giants – Montroll and Diaz have similar design styles, huge active legacy

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