Flipping through an obscure copy of Papiroflexia Bicolour by Fernando Gilgado, I was struck with a pair of … models that looked like fun to make.
I had some small (10in) squares of handmade Kozo left over from the eagle fold and thought I would give it a whirl.
The fun and hilarity began – I have provided you with a cutout so you can do some arrangement depending on your orientation and preference – is it “Adam and Eve”, “Adam and Steve” or “Eve and Gwen” – you decide. Continue reading
Fernando Gilgado is a legendary character folder, I have made many of his models, this one is a charmer:
from one sheet of paper, you get 6 pages, a hard cover, arms, legs, a smile and eyes peeping over the top – neat
So, as I mark furiously (having run out of the ability to put it off any longer), my procrastigami takes hold and I started bending something. I also wanted to try out my new self-healing craft mat (the green griddy thing) and have discovered that folding from an iPad or other tablet is better than a book because of the pinch-zooming possible to help old eyes see details of diagrams. Continue reading
I have grown to respect a number of designers of all nationalities and Fernando Gilgado from Spain is one who is guaranteed to produce a challenging model:
This is the Demon, and the devil in the details, trust me – his head alone is frightening – 2 sets of horns, beard, snarly mouth, eyes etc. His body is very dense, arms and legs 20+ layers of paper but that bunching results in the most splendid wings and a pointy demonic tail.
This instruction set was a real challenge – apart from folding it during school time (in between end of year report checking and tidying up), the instructions were in Spanish, and some aspects of it were very fiddly indeed. Even at 54cm x 54 cm, the head and facial features were too small to fold tidily, still, as a first fold I am very pleased with this. It is a monster, wing span of nearly 30cm and he looks very menacing – in a cutey sort of way.
I thought the “angels” of yesterday needed some “demons” today to bring some sort of balance to the paper cosmos. A suitable end of my second last month of this challenge.
Throughout history, people have acted “the fool” for many and varied reasons. In medieval court, Jesters acted the fool in a bid for self-preservation and increased favour:
All too often the jester is actually pretty bright, but uses that intelligence to work out ways of appearing foolish, doing comically silly things and overtly hiding in plain sight. The often painful “notice me” behavior is more of an indication of their own insecurity often than the bravado it exemplifies.
We all know jesters (more correctly, people who “act the fool”) – one can only wonder, when the retrospect finally kicks in (or when someone in the real world finally has had enough and punches them in the face and finally tells them to STFU), how they contemplate the time wasted avoiding behaving like everyone else and realise they actually had to work harder to appear so silly.
This is a wonderful character piece designed by Spanish origamist Fernando Gilgado. A hideous exercise in box pleating, made more so by the use of copy paper, which I struggled to prevent from disintegrating along commonly folded creases. After the initial pre-creasing, nearly no new folds are introduced in this brilliant design. He looks happy, a little silly, and has detailed face, a wonderful pointed hat with bells on. With duo paper, the face, hands and feet end up one colour, the rest (clothes and hat) are the other colour – again, genius in design.
I am very happy with this as a first fold – even if it seem to take an age it was a great way to weather a morning thunderstorm, and I will fold this again.
Because this model is flat, and great on one side (less so on the other), it suits card mounting, like this:
My second favorite sci-fi film of all time (Alien) brought new forms of terror to the screen:
In a well tried formula, a nasty makes itself on board a spaceship firmly clamped to the face of an inquisitive explorer (John Hurt), implanting an egg in the host’s tummy before scaring everyone and dropping dead. The newly hatched nasty then systematically, and with great suspense, eats everyone – you get that. This prototype xenomorph is all the more terifying because, based on Geiger illustrations, organically modelled after a sinister hand.
I like that there was always a life-cycle implicit in the Alien films, and that there was an innate social order amongst the xenmporphs also.
This model was a little trickey to fold – I had to nurse the copy paper as at many junctures it looked like it would disintegrate – I managed the fold without any paper fatigue I am proud to say and it is a worthy proto alien to compliment the adult I folded earlier in the year
Insectoid, reptilian, with gripsey fingers for walking, prehensile tail to wrap around the neck of the victim, off lung sacks for gas exchange, a well thought out model indeed (even if the instruction annotations were bewildering – thankfully I am confident enough to improvise when I cannot make head nor tail of what is supposed to go where)..
