wow

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 →

821: (271/365) Satoshi Kamiya’s Ant

| wonko

After re-subscribing to JOAS, in record time my back-issues of the Tanteidan magazine arrived and along with one of them, a really challenging diagram:

About 170 steps, extreme paper torture and, as a project, something truly terrifying but I knew I needed to try it. 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 →

710: (160/365) Star Luisium Test Fold

| wonko

The internet is an amazing thing, it affords connections between mortals and luminaries in the field:

I noticed Sara Adams (a living legend in the Origami World) was asking for test folders to test diagrams she was drawing and I immediately put my hand up. 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 →