1126: Matt LaBoone’s “Chinese Dragon”

Matt shared a 2015 design on Fakebook recently, so I decided that given it is nearly Chinese New YEar, and it is a “Year of the Dragon”, folding a dragon I had not yet attempted was a good idea:

This dragon, in structure, is similar to Kamiya’s Ryujin 1.2 (in sheet layout at least), but does some interesting things with the body and tail that were fun to fold.

Initially I tried it with a sheet of Yukogami, and abandoned it before I managed to get to the base because it was just too thick. I resorted to a nice crispy thin 55cm square of Kraft (I should have test folded it first anyways – doh!).

I added a wire armature and did a swirly pose, raised a front foot and had the opposite foot mid-step, it is a little cute.

Chinese dragons differ from the Western tradition by not needing wings to fly – they are way more “serpentine” as opposed to scaley bird or scary bat.

1105: En Garde

It is a wonderful thing when designers share their processes, crease patterns and diagrams. Boice Wong is one that readily shares the CPs of his amazing designs, and when I saw “Sword and Shield V2”, I knew I had to give it a go:

Although I have been folding for decades, most of what i have folded has been from DIAGRAMS (step by step folding guides). By far the MAJORITY of origami out there does not exist as diagrams, but a larger proportion exist as CPs (crease patterns). I have been, over the last few years, working on my crease pattern solving skills.

This model is based on Boice’s 24 grid CP, and the collapse is relatively straight forward. Sometimes CPs give you crease orientations (red=mountain, blue=valley), sometimes not. The skill comes with deciding which creases to impose first as part of the collapse. Sometimes it does not matter, most it does, some you can derive based on “knock on effects” on one crease that causes the orientation of a sequence of subsequent creases. Sometimes it is pure witchcraft.

Continue reading

1090: Kusudama Ball

Stumbling through my socials, I noticed a video tutorial of a reverse-engineered model originally designed by Ekaterina Lukasheva and knew I needed to try it:

kusudama ball

This 30 unit modular ball is a lovely bit of engineering, you make a bow-tie shaped unit and then, via a series of really positive locked tabs in pockets you form groups of 3 units that swirl around 5-unit shaped holes.

I chose Tuttle indigo dye duo paper and split each sheet into 4 squares, meaning the units were small but manageable. Construction was fairly easy – the units lock together fairly well but during construction the whole structure is really floppy. It is not until you have a near sphere that the paper tension kicks in and stabilises the shape – the final unit pulls the sphere round.

kusudama units

The Tuttle paper was a little thin, structure-wise, but folding this from thicker paper would begin to compromise the accuracy of the folding, making it less spherical – an interesting balancing act.

Continue reading

1084: Square Spaceness

I have a huge pile of “must get around to folding this” models and “Square Spaceness” designed by Alessandra Lamio is one of this legion:

1084: Square Spaceness - plan view

Take a square, divide it into a 16×16 grid, lay in strategic mountain and valleys and you get this almost Escher-like tessellation molecule (meaning you _could_ put multiples of these if you had a more expansive grid with some tweaks and a bit of smush).

Charged with the confidence Advent of Tess gave me, I knew it was time to give this a whirl. There are many long slight diagonal valleys that make up the bulk of the geometry for the inward sloping spirals, and the corner widget is ingenious as a lock, and adjusting the outside pleats lets it sit flat – love it.

1084: Square Spaceness - diamond view
Continue reading

1074: Little Dragon

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”:

Peter Buchan-Symons' "Little Dragon"

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.

Continue reading