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967: Spike the Echidna

| wonko

Australia is the home of many unique animals – few come odder than monotremes, mammals that lay eggs – an echidna is one such critter.

spiny norman

I had seen folds of Steven Casey’s Echidna but struggled to find a source of diagrams – only by drilling down in Pinterest did I find some copyright infringer’s scanned pages of the diagrams (sorry, I would have purchased them could I find a publication that had them) and knew I had to have a go at it.

Central to the success of this model is the lovely crop of spines – these are treated scales (much like those that adorn Satoshi Kamiya’s Ryu Jin 2.1+), a lovely “preliminary base” tessellation that I had already mastered. the rest of the model is making the surrounding paper do the work of all the other stickey-outey bits of the animal.

spiny norman views

I particularly love the snout and head, so simple but so nice. It has 4 feet, each with toes – just genius.

You fold it, the resultant shape before you collapse it into it’s end 3D shape looks a lot like a pelt – not sure National Parks and Wildlife would appreciate the notion of an Echidna Pelt, but it then becomes round and plumptious and locks together ingeniously into an adorable spikey ball full of character.

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962: Ryu Jin 2.1 – Head

| wonko

In a bid to calm down and relax after a brutal week at work, I took a 60cm square of red/natural Ikea Kraft paper and started folding… and folded, and folded and folded.

Ryujui 1.2 head

I have been lured back into the fold (as it were) of Ryu Jin folders (nerds who attempt to fold Satoshi Kamiya’s devilishly difficult dragon series). Having already folded a 1.0, 1.2 and 3.5, I noticed that I had never attempted a 2.1.

Ryujui 1.2 head views and detail

For the uninitiated, the numbers indicate refinements, with the 1.0 being vaguely dragon like and the 3.5 (the culmination of this design process) being the most astonishingly detailed design imaginable.

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961: Drogon, The Black Dragon

| wonko

The lure of Satoshi Kamiya’s Dragon set is alluring. Recently I was invited into a community that celebrates the RyuJin series. Having folded a 1.0 and a 3.5, I thought it time to fold another:

Drogo, Satoshi Kamiya's RyuJin 1.2

This is the 1.2 – a refinement of the 1.0 and I had fun shaping the head as per a guide by Daniel Brown – a luscious and generously shared photodiagram set that I really enjoyed following.

My 1.2 is actually based on almost an identical crease pattern to the 1.0 I folded back in 2013, but back then I had NO IDEA how to shape it, and sort of made up shit as I went along.

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940: Kentrosaurus

| wonko

How often have you been totally lost in something – you know, time passes and you are so involved that you do not notice the passing of it? This model ate time and paper in quantity:

A fascinating exercise in vertex isolation, from a square to tease so many points while keeping enough paper for a body, legs and head – wow, just wow.

I found the diagrams as an un-attributed set of images on Pinterest (one of the many bastions of copyright infringement) but could not find details of either the designer or the publication – hints peeps? News just in: This is Fumiaki Kawahata’s Tuojiangosaurus published in the book “Origami Fantasy”

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934: Mikiller觅晨’s Modular Dragon

| wonko

Assignment time at school is fairly boring, for the most part, for a teacher. Students have lots to do, you need to be available to help on demand but there is a fair bit of sitting around waiting to be needed:

I had found a bunch of PDF’s explaining briefly how to fold parts of what I had assumed would eventually be a dragon. After trial folding the head and a foot I thought it was something I could do in stages. I (arbitrarily) decided my “standard square” would be the biggest cut from an A3 page. Most parts were then made using this standard.

Origami purists would probably have issues with this design, as there is an element of paper craft in some of the details, the head, for instance, is actually 1 standard square and 6 other bits of paper, folded and (shhh) glued in place. The body was made from 7 separate standard squares, 6 of which were the same, the tail segment was a little different to create the fan end.

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921 Leong Chen Chit’s 20 Intersecting Cubes

| wonko

When I first saw this modular, it broke my brain, but knew I wanted to fold it. I looked and looked for instructions and finally reached out to Leong Chen Chit, through connections to Sydney Origami Group on fakebook:

Units for this model are folded from an ‘almost’ half a4 sheet, through an ingenious geometric construction you get a fan fold that can then be mutated into the basic unit. Continue reading →

915: (365/365) Chris K Palmer’s “Flower Tower”

| wonko

I have a long and terrifying “fold me” list of models I will one day get around to – this was on it:

An excruciating fractal tessellation that eats paper like few other folds, based on spiral collapses of a dodecagon that then gets turned inside out to make the next level to collapse.

The unfold and re-collapse stages (I did 3, but theoretically could keep going getting smaller and smaller) looks like it is going to hell in a handbasket, then it sort of just sorts itself out in a magic sort of way. Continue reading →

845: (295/365) Leaf Katydid

| wonko

Insects seem to be a fascination among origami designers – at the height of “bug wars” when designers were competing for the most intricate designs that were  complex, had lots of legs, were thin and realistic renderings and really pushed the boundaries of existing techniques:

This astonishing model starts as a frog base. Through a torturous set of point isolation and narrowing, we get the impossibly thin legs and a lovely set of antennae. Halve this, now fold that in half, then do a double rabbit ear, now halve that … thank goodness for thiiiiin paper and accurate folding. Continue reading →

795: (245/365) Tessellated Fractal

| wonko

Further exploring Shuzo Fujimoto’s “Hydrangea” fractal, it seems they can also be tessellated:

This is a 4x fold, but I have seen many many more, closer together also, interweaving and other mind-boggling combinations.

This fold has taken an age – started 4 days ago, finished yesterday (I had already decided on the spring shoot for yesterday’s fold) it is a lovely frame. Continue reading →

725: (175/365) 145 Point Sea Urchin

| wonko

So I ended up scoring an unexpected free afternoon so decided that serious paper torture would be fun:

Gridding then a breathtaking collapse took 4 hours to begin with. I knew I was up for a marathon fold to finish. Annoyingly I did not get this finished before fatigue took me – sometimes you get that. Continue reading →

625: (75/365) Mariposa

| wonko

I must admit to liking folding insects in Origami – something about the extreme paper wrangling necessary to separate out features from the sheet is a great challenge:

This is Eduardo Clemente’s “Mariposa” or Butterfly. An interesting fold indeed. Continue reading →

3D Photography Using Fyuse

| wonko

A friend (waves at Roland!) excitedly showed me a new app called Fyuse that allows you to scan objects and create  interactive 3D photos of them.

For ages I have been increasingly unhappy with flat photos of really complex origami models and this tool seems to solve that problem, so long as the lighting is ok.

Unlike panorama software where you pan scenery and it stitches a long photo into a surround-scape, with Fyuse you focus on the object, moving the camera around it.

You can change the camera angle and do other things to enhance the photo but it is pretty neat – I will definitely experiment with it more.

If viewing this page on a mobile device, tilt and the images move with you in a sort of augmented reality sort of a way – otherwise drag with your mouse pointer to view these models for all sorts of angles.

I like that you can use a flash, move the model as you pan and that it allows you to see the nooks and crannies that would otherwise not be represented in a conventional flat photo

528: Joisel’s Pangolin

| wonko

Few Origami models reach Iconic status, few have the charm and grace of Eric Joisel’s Pangolin. I thought I would have a go at this fold:528Pangolin

Based, in part, on a field of diagonal graduated pleats that are “popped” into scaley plates, shaped simply to suggest tail, head and feet, his folds have a unique life breathed into them. Continue reading →

523: Francis Ow’s Double Cube

| wonko

I seem fixated on modular origami at the moment (a branch I have not really done very much in). When I saw Francis Ow’s Double Cube, I asked him if I could have a go at folding it:523DoubleCube

He generously shared some instructions with me (how amazing is the Internet – it can put you in actual touch with people you consider design legends) and I set about wrestling with the fold. Continue reading →

498: Koh’s Rabbit

| wonko

Every so often a model emerges that has such a naturalistic form that so perfectly represents the subject. This lovely rabbit, designed by Ronald Koh is one such “must fold” figure:498Kohrabbit

This lovely model is a dense fold (the hind quarters are necessary layer-dense to form the necessary flaps for the head), so thin paper is best – I failed on a 14.5cm square of coarse hand-made paper – it was too thick and my fat clumsy fingers could not tease the details but 20cm+ squares of most papers should be fine. Continue reading →

497: Tyrannosaurus Rex

| wonko

I have been on holiday, 6 weeks is a long time between folds but I thought I would ease back into it with a simple model … then I saw Fumiaki Kawahata’s TRex and thought “screw it”:497RexView

Waiting in my kept mail was the last Tanteidan of the previous subscription, this little beauty on the cover and I thought – how hard can this be? Continue reading →

442: Ryujin 1.0

| wonko

Satoshi Kamiya’s Ryujin series is legendary in the Origami Community. Starting at the relatively simple 1.0 (folded here),  the next iteration is 1.2, then a new morphology 2.1 culminating in the insane 3.5:

Whilst I am not sure I have the time nor skill to even attempt 2.1 (let alone 3.5), my attempt at 1 is chronicled here.

After finding much discussion about it on the HK Origami Forum, and only being able to find a blurry (published by Satoshi himself deliberately blurry) I reasoned “how hard could this be?” Continue reading →