animal

Showing Off

| wonko

Our school has large display cases. I have kilograms of origami at home, in showboxes, tidy tubs, cupboards, garbage bags and display cases … one thing led to another:

library display 2019

My aim with this display to to show the variety of forms modern Origami takes, from traditional, figurative, geometry and abstract. Additionally I have included 14 different dragons, a current fascination – can you find them all?

I feature some of my favourite pieces, designed by legends such as Satoshi Kamiya, Robert Lang, Eric Domaine, Francis Ow, Ronald Koh, Kade Chan, Eric Joisel, Brian Chan, Jason Ku and more.

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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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960: Make Origami Great Again

| wonko

Playing with a CP designed by Flynn Jackson, this little cappy chappy is a fun fold:

little cap man

It reminds me of those people, who wear their red MAGA caps waaaaay too tight (and hence restrict blood flow to their brains?), and this little guy is also wearing sunnies.

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959: Jackson’s Goblin Mask

| wonko

Continuing my quest to master the face, I decided to explore the facial widgets of CP#15, one of many generous public designs by Flynn Jackson:

Goblin - black and white

From a single uncut square, emerges the angular features of a lovely goblin.

goblin - scale

I am particularly interested in the formation of the nose, and it’s linkage to the nose bridge – something I want to master for another long-term project.

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957: Tragic Clown

| wonko

There is a story of a deeply depressed man who, when seeking help from a psychiatrist, was given the advice that he should cheer himself up by seeing the visiting clown, the great “Joseph Grimaldi”. With the suggestion, the man wept more intensely. “I am Grimaldi”, he said.

clown mask

I am terrified of clowns, just putting that out there. That said, I saw this little CP of a “Pierrot” with a silly hat and decided to procrastinate even further and attempt to fold it.

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956: Children of the Forest

| wonko

So GOT has started again, the final season and it is a promised shitstorm between people and the undead (sorry, if that is a spoiler).

children of the forest - Flynn Jackson's CP

It seems ALL of the trouble of the resident ice-zombies was caused by an experiment between a man and a race called “the children of the forest”, and some dragon glass, but that plot point will be explored further I guess as the series winds up. This mask reminds me of what I imagined the children of the forest looked like when I read the books.

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953: Nollentonk

| wonko

My second test fold from a book by Tetsuya Gotani, this time a “Nollentonk”:

nollentonk

I say “Nollentonk”, only because my sister, when young, used to call elephants nollentonks – not sure why.

nollentonk views

This lovely folding sequence carefully hides white right until the emergence of the tusks via a clever colour change. The morphology of the model emerges as distinctly elephantine fairly early on and some of the moves that isolate features are delicious.

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952: Styracosaurus

| wonko

I have the honour and privilege of being asked to help edit a new origami book by Tetsuya Gotani. The first diagram I did was of this beautiful Styracosaurus:

Tetsuya Gotani's Styracosaurus

I started with a 60cm square of patterned Kraft, and after a bunch of collapses to make a bewildering collection of isolated points.

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951: Trike

| wonko

The remnants of a pack of Daiso washi was sitting in my cupboard and i am not sure, so I start folding Fumiaki Kawahata’s Triceratops (from Origami Tanteidan Magazine 57) and realised why it was unused:

triceratops by Fumiaki Kawahata (Origami Tanteidan Magazine 57)

You assume that paper is square, and start folding, only to discover in some dimensions it is really not square, but you persist none the less, kludging landmarks as you go.

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Plan B (or “Home is where the hive is”)

| wonko

I was approached by a mate mid 2018 with the idea of an original origami commission, but was given no real timeline (which for an OCD procrastinator like me is a recipe for a little crazy time.

framed picture

The end result, finished near the end of February 2019, is vastly different from how I had initially envisaged it. It was actually really hard to part with this one – so much creative energy went into it’s genesis.

the new happy owner
A new home, Happy Birthday Paige (albeit belated, sorry)
Depth, scale, detail.
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941: New Year Squeaker (Boar Piglet)

| wonko

2019 is the Year of the Pig – a fresh page that you are free to form anyway you choose:

blank canvas

There are a pair of pig models in Tanteidan 172 I mean to try, this is the first – a wild boar piglet. Little known fact: boar piglets have stripes (presumably for camouflage) while vulnerably young.

little pig
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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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Santa/Satan – Ho Ho bloody Ho!

| wonko

Curious things parents, we present certain things as fact and then later we say that they were little white lies, but truth is a slippery thing indeed:

Easter bunny, collector of kiddies teeth, stranger in a red suit causing toddlers to scream in terror when they are perched on their knee in supermarkets – what an odd tradition.

Lovely “santa” re-fold, faux 3D, designed with some lovely colour changes by Steven Casey – ’tis the season.

939: A Weyr of Red Dragons

| wonko

It has been a while since I last blogged a fold. Truth be told the end of the term beat me up a lot – coupled with a savage cold, auto-immune rash (I still have) and an infected tear duct, on top of the marking and reporting it beat me up proper:

That said, folding remains a refuge and I did fold a lot in the interim, just did not blog about it – must redress the balance.

I “found” a set of diagrams, well, stumbled across them on Pinterest (the largest bastion of copyright infringement) and decided it was worth a fold after seeing an unauthorised youtube video tutorial of the same fold (I must have skipped over it while scanning the document).

Paper sizes for body, wings and head
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