square. waterbomb

281: The Jester

| wonko

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:

191: Scorpion

| wonko

I have seen many models of various complicated insects, and intend to try many – my first foray is not an insect at all, but a scorpion:

This is a well designed model with 8 legs, a pair of lovely claws and a crab-like carapace underneath

The tail, IWHO, is a major oversight – it ends up so thick and fatigued that it was very difficult to model and you can see (if you look close) paper fatigue took it’s toll along the back primary crease and part way up the tail. Copy paper is not up to this job but I found out waaay to late in the fold to even consider re-starting it with different paper.

Some interesting and precise folds beforehand mean a collapse and a bunch of reverse folds easily make the legs and claws, quite impressed – could see also how this technique could be used to make a squid as well, will keep that in my toolbox of folds to consider.

31: Flutterby

| wonko

So I have begun Flash Animation with my year 9 ICTE students, and one of the orientation exercises is building a Butterfly, animating it and then making a scene with them in it – all interesting stuff and the inspiration for today’s model:

Akira Yoshizawa is a luminary in the Origami world, being a prolific inventor of folds many figurative, some very lifelike indeed. His butterfly is simple but lovely –  the body gets so thick that the copy paper split at the head, sadly, but the intention is there.