3hrs

1039: Jang Yong Ik’s “Smilodon”

| wonko

Whilst being eliminated from the Origami Tournament, I am still interested in the models being folded by surviving contestants. This week’s challenge was Jang Yong Ik’s :Smilodon” – a “sabre tooth tiger” like critter from time gone past:

Jang Yong Ik's "Smilodon"

The fold sequence is intense – this model ate up a 70cm square of black/natural duo Kraft paper like few other models. The body is thick and heavy, some sections had dozens of layers.

Jang Yong Ik's "Smilodon" view

I took my time, considered as I went, determined to succeed on my first fold. In retrospect, using thinner paper would have an advantage in that the layer management would be easier, but the legs would be flimsy and require wire supports – tough for a designer to distribute paper structurally.

Jang Yong Ik's "Smilodon" scale

In the end, we have a crouching toothy fossil, it was an interesting exercise and entrants did some good shaping to personalise their folds. I enjoyed exploring the sequence.

1035: Hand and Boat

| wonko

It is the days you do not look in your mailbox that mail arrives – I arrived home from work to find an astonishing collection of paper from Pham Hoang Tuan’s origami shop, and a couple of his diagrams, all screaming “fold me!”, so I started that journey:

"Hand and Boat" by Pham Hoang Tuan

I had only ever seen this model complete and in CP form, failed at solving that CP 2 times and had given up folding it for now, then it arrived in diagram form to my delight.

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1030: Satoshi Kamiya’s Horse

| wonko

Further exploring all things equinine, I realised I had never folded Satoshi Kamiya’s horse:

Satoshi Kamiya's Horse

Central to this horse design is a lovely mane, but the volume and proportions of this model are amazing, the base it originates from is immediately “horsey”.

Shaping matters, and I think I have been a little clumsy, but I suspect some of the fat is the paper – crisp 70cm kraft – I think if I had used a thinner/more textured paper the result would look less like a plastic horse.

There are lots of really challenging moves in this sequence – gathering the pleats to allow you to fan out the mane while not distorting the outside layers in mindboggling – there is LOTS of paper hidden, and I think my accuracy for this, the first fold, was pretty good.

Satoshi Kamiya's Horse scale

I must chase up a copy of Issei Yoshino’s book – that horse has a mane that apparently inspired Satoshi to design this one.

1012: Cluster

| wonko

If one word sums up 2020, it has to be “cluster”. Sadly, in the Covi-19 era, we find at the centre of most clusters is a cluster-f*ck:

Xander Perrott's "Trillian"

In desperate need of a fold, I turned to Xander Perrott’s e-book “Folded Forms” that I bought a while ago and settled on “Trillian” – a glorious 30 unit modular cluster that looks a little like a flower ball.

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1010: Foschi’s “Black Widow”

| wonko

Determined to work on one of my known folding weaknesses (solving crease patterns), I decided to have a go at Riccardo Foschi’s “Black Widow”:

Folded from 4×1 rectangle, box pleating teases out lovely long legs, cephalothorax and abdomen. With a little magic I managed to extend some pincer-like jaws also to use up some of the paper that was otherwise lurking in the transition between the body and the legs, which was quite pleasing.

Riccardo Foschi's Black Widow

Half the job is the collapse – working out what should be mountain, what should be valley, and the order of the collapse. The rest of the work (some say the hardest bit) is in the shaping as, often, the base you collapse to only roughly corresponds to the morphology of the final form, you then need to primp, tease, thin and pose to gain model finesse.

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