934: Mikiller觅晨’s Modular Dragon

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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932: Clever Girl

In a classic scene from the first Jurassic Park movie, a hunter realises he has just been surrounded by hungry, angry velociraptors, and utters the words “clever girl” before being ripped to shreds:

This delightful mode is really simple to fold, and belongs to that stable of models whose proportions are perfect, detail is sufficient, form is elegant and stable as is – a mark of clever design.

There is lots to love about this little snapper – the head, the placement of the haunches, the gentle curve of the tail – fabulous.  Continue reading

925: Crouching Dragon

Origami dragons and wyverns seem to be a bit of a “holy grail”, with the more complex gaining almost mythic reputations for breaking folders spirits when they attempt them:

I came upon the diagrams for this charming model shared on fakebook, and it took a moment to hunt down the designer – Shaku on Flickr. Continue reading

Triceratops

EDIT: as a kind reader pointed out, I have already folded this model, so it cannot count as one of the current 365. It is a relief on 2 fronts (1) Someone is reading and (2) This fold of this model is vastly superior to the original

Some call me a dinosaur, they may be justified but if I am even half as cool as this Triceratops, then it is all good:

Designed by Jun Maekawa, this delightful little dinosaur is one of my +favs so far in that it has all the triceratopsy features (3 horns, flat plate head, stocky body, lovely proportions) and still remains simple enough to achieve easily with a 40cm square (prolly smaller with more nimble fingers)
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836: (286/365) Pteranodon

I for one think collectors of fossils need to be really careful piecing together extinct animals from scant remains.

Many a time illogical collections of bones have been cobbled together to bamboozle the public and, at first glance, a Pteranodon seems about illogical as a platypus. Continue reading

813: (263/365) Llook out, there are Llamas!

PART 2: THE LLAMA, LIVE FROM GOLDERS GREEN
The llama is a quadruped
which lives in big rivers like the Amazon.

It has two ears,
a heart,
a forehead,
and a beak for eating honey,
but it is provided with fins for swimming.
Llamas are bigger than frogs. Continue reading

812: (262/365) Tiny T-Rex

This rather adorable tiny dino is designed cleverly by Eduardo Clemente:

I am so impressed with the body morphology of this model, position and proportion of limbs seems really well considered. Continue reading

759: (209/365) Takashi Hojyo’s Dragon

Leafing through the Tanteidan Convention book #5, I came across an early Dragon design by Takashi Hojyo:

This model is a modular – 3 parts (head/tail, body/legs and lovely wings) made from the same sized square, it needs glue (shhhh, I used a couple of nubs of double-sided tape) to keep it together but has a comic-like charm. Continue reading

742: (192/365) Chicken or the Egg

The age old questions, “what came first, the chicken or the egg” can be best answered with available fossil records as Dinosaurs came first:

Waterproof eggs, such a step forward, liberating egg laying critters from having to deposit precious and defenceless young in pools, streams or wet places and allowed full colonisation of the land. Continue reading

736: (186/365) Stoopid Monkey!

Australian politicians are a weird lot. Not “American” (shoot first then barbeque something) weird, just an odd lurch from crisis to crisis and stab your mate in the back for a shot at leadership kind of weird:

A recently deposed Prime Minister (Mr Tony Abott) is being a bit of an arse clown in the media, white-anting his own party and providing gifts for our hapless opposition in terms of instability and leaks. Continue reading

722: (172/365) Baby Dragon

Reporting is a beast of a thing, particularly semester reporting where we seem to joust with nit-picking grammar on parts of a report that parents do not read. Slaying the beast is particularly satisfying:

This is Riccardo Foschi’s Baby Lizard Dragon … thing. I found the CP and a photo of the finished model and thought ‘how hard could this be?’. Continue reading

650: (100/365) Mi Wu’s Dragon

Now I must admit for model 100 of the current 365, to starting this mode before we went on holidays, but left it barely started as it has taken me an age to decrypt the directions for folding it:

This lovely, plucky little dragon needs much bigger paper. Teasing the details and final shaping at this scale is torture. Continue reading

639: (89/365) Baby TRex

I am sure dinosaurs were not cute – not even baby ones as they were snappy wild beasts:

The little purple beauty is designed by Issei Yoshino and is a lovely exercise in colour management. Continue reading

630: (80/365) Eastern Dragon

The dragon is a favourite subject for origami designers – most have tried their hand at one:

This is Joseph Wu’s “Eastern Dragon” – how can we tell it is an eastern dragon? It has no wings and does not need them to fly. It is only us silly westerners that decided to rationalise the dragon morphology.

I have been meaning to fold this for ages – nothing like a 365 challenge to bring out the models on hold. Continue reading