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982: Satoshi Kamiya’s “Tiger”

| wonko

I have been on a mission for months now to try and render a tiger as realistically as I can in paper. Apart from being feline in shape, tigers have stripes – finding a model that has these stripes was difficult:

Kamiya's Tiger

I bought Satoshi Kamiya’s latest book because of the tiger diagrams it contained – on flicking through the 200+ steps I initially thought it too difficult to try. But try I did, initially with large format red-natural Ikea Kraft paper. I was surprised that I was able to make it through the most torturous steps, so set about re-folding it with black/natural, ensuring the black was the stripes, natural was the residual body colour.

The genius of this design is the subtle and precise control of both sides of the sheet – the stripes are the result of folds, not cuts. The model requires you manipulate raw edges (the sheet border) fan-folded, while wrestling all the other details (legs, head, tail) from the INSIDE of the sheet – quite amazing.

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T-Rex Revisited

| wonko

I love a well-designed model and Fumiaki Kawahata’s T-Rex is no exception:

Trex

Folded from a 50cm square of medium green Tant paper, this lovely snapper has a splendid mobile jaw with teeth, fabulous feet and tail, and frustratingly useless front legs. The result is a fantastic free-standing model that looks simultaneously cute and terrifying.

The model structure is intense, this is the smallest I have tried it, and at this scale the pre-creasing is torturous (to be polite). The folds that raise the teeth from a series of accordion pleats are ingenious and tough work for fat clumsy fingers.

I have folded this before, and will probably return to it, as it is a great exercise in accuracy and patience – really good fold-therapy for a fragged and shagged brain.

trex view

972: “Simple” Square Rose

| wonko

I bought Naomiki Sato’s first book on origami roses to satisfy an obsession with mastering his pentagonal rose (a quest that is still in progress). Recently, he has published a second book (this one in English) and I knew I had to buy it:

complete

Perhaps starting my journey in the new book with a 15cm square of red washi was possibly not the most sensible thing to do (waay smaller than suggested), however I ploughed on and much to my delight fashioned a fairly decent rendering of the simple square rose – the first rose I have folded from a square that actually looks like a rose.

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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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