camel

351: Diaz’s Stallion

| wonko

Roman Diaz is one of many talented Spanish origamists and with this model he captures something of the proud noble stallion:

there is much to like about this model – apart from it being a nifty use of the fish/camel base, the posture, proportions and attitude evident in the horse are present in this little model. He is also free-standing, on 3 legs, neato.

A slight mis-calculation in scale made this model really difficult to fold – the thickness of paper and tiny details made shaping a real challenge – I will fold this bigger because there is much model-ability here, truly clever design.

I got caught up in a much more complicated fold and completely forgot I had no fold for today, so searched the list of “must dos” and came up with this one. Happy with this as a first fold.

348: T-Rex Skeleton

| wonko

This is nuts, seriously NUTS. I started this model 2 weeks before exam block, and have been chipping away at it ever since:

This monolithic modular is Yoshino’s T-Rex Skeleton and I for one am totally impressed with the attention to design detail here. Firstly the overall proportions are correct – no mean feat as it is comprised of 21 A3-cut squares, each piece designed to slot together, each piece correct in relation to the others – wow.

If you carefully consider – the head is 2 pieces (top of skull and jaw), neck (snarly pleated sculpture) is 2 pieces, each arm/shoulder blade assembly is 1 piece, then the rib cage – 6 varying size/curvature ribs (1 piece each), pelvis (2 pieces), lovely long legs, bastard of a tail (5 segments, each took over an hour in itself).

I am really pleased with the result, and will probably work out a wire armature to run along the spine so it will stand. The school Science Department have expressed interest in displaying this beastie as I certainly have no where big enough – tail to nose it is over a metre long and nearly as high.

This has taken an age to fold – each piece was a complex model in itself and the instructions were only in Japanese – no useful annotations and annoyingly a different symbolism than is conventional to describe the steps – grrrr. I had to ask the Japanese Department to see if there were even any clues as to the suggested paper size of whether it was stated if the paper all had to be the same size – in the end I GUESSED it probably was.

Still, it worked, and wow, no I mean WOW – this guy is amazing.

279: Computer Mouse

| wonko

It was announced today that Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple Computer passed away today after a long battle with pancreatic cancer:

It is my considered opinion that Apple Computers lead a revolution in personal computing for many reasons, an important one being the re-introduction of the computer mouse as an integral pointing device for a graphical user interface that drove the computer.

They did not invent it – that particular landmark belongs to Douglas Engelbart’s computer mouse, whose patent was issued in 1970 for a X-Y Position Indicator For A Display System, but I think the Macintosh computer helped popularise it and it seemed to take the PC world years to catch on to this great idea – Jobs saw it immediately.

The world needs visionaries – good visionaries persist as figureheads of successful ventures and Apple’s success in part is directly attributable to the charisma and marketability of the man. Rest in Peace Steve Jobs.

A more complete photo diagram is here:

Have a go at it using this diagram

271: Pelican

| wonko

I have been looking for a nice pelican (yes, I know that is an odd thing to say, but good pelican origami models are hard to find):

This is the best I have found so far, and although it is not free-standing, contains much that is pelicanny.

Lovely bill, nice feet (if a little thin and spindly) and the vestiges of nice wings, I think I will keep looking.

Folded after returning home from a conference (lots of nice people sharing). Busy times, sometimes you get that.

235: Charlie the Unicorn

| wonko

Now I have been told off by Dr Winston O’Boogie for folding creepy crawlys and scary things and was told I should concentrate on unicorns and rainbows:

This is John Montrol’s Unicorn – a relatively simple fold with a nice horsey shape.

So much paper folded inside, it ends up having a plump body and very thick legs and a lovely twirly unicorn stickey-uppey horney thing

This will do me for unicorns for the moment, although I will be on the look out for another one as the horse shape is one much folded by origami designers as it is quite difficult to capture the equine profile.