Origami has featured in cinema in many ways. The Blade Runner franchise uses origami figures to accentuate certain story points and the most recent movie features an elderly “Gaff”, in a retirement home, folding a sheep:
After some research it seems the model was a tweaked Jun Maekawa model. tweaked because the original has curled horns that would make a quick-shot less clear on screen. Continue reading
I am always on the look out for well designed Kangaroos:
Interestingly, the best ones are often designed by people who do not have them around. This delightful 2-part model is designed by Kunihiko Kasahara, from the book “Origami Made Easy”. Continue reading
It is a full moon, 24 miles south of the OKish Corral, and the local Coyotes are howling:
This rather cute wolf/dog/coyote…thing is a rather nicely structured quadruped that I think is a useful base for modelling other such critters.
It is part of a collection of wolves/howling things I looked out for when a particular house at school decided to use a howling wolf as their mascot this year. Continue reading
Busy week, nearly at the weekend, this lovely little fold is a perfectly adorable spaniel:
Designed by Patricia Kunz Tomic, in DOT1, I like the use of paper, general proportions and general spanielity. Continue reading
First day of the new month, one superstition seems to be to say “White Rabbits” as the first thing you say that day – not sure why:
This is Fernando Castellanos’ rabbit, taken from DOT2, and it seems, designed to be folded on a MUCH larger sheet of paper than this. Continue reading
Recently I had the privilege to see Humpback Whales lounging and playing in Hervey Bay:
I was determined to fold a Humpback, but only really found one designer that had designed something that even remotely looks like a Humpback. Highly tapered body, hooked dorsal fin, soft bellows-like throat, tail fluke – this model has it all.
Made for duo paper, this model has white bits in roughly the right places but none on the underside of the tail, oddly. Continue reading
Amazed as I was with the postal response rate from Origamishop.com in France, my “Drawing Origami Tome 2” hardcover arrived before I got back from holidays. It is full of models for me to try, this is the first one in the book:
A simple bat, made for duo paper, it looks a little more like the “bat signal” from classic batman days, but is none the less cute. Continue reading
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
In a fit of elephantine existentialism, one must ask an important question: “What makes a good Origami Elephant?”:
This is Paul Jackson’s “One Fold Elephant” – is it a good elephant and how would we know? What are ESSENTIAL characteristics that a model should have to be considered elephantine? Obvious characteristics of an elephant (well, for anyone who has ever actually seen one) could include discernible TRUNK, big(ish) flappy EARS and a big solid BODY. We could visually recognise an elephant with way less information than that so why do we require mind-popping details implicit in super-complex paper renderings of elephants when something much simpler does the job.
Purists would argue that all origami is, in essence, figurative representations of real objects. Thereby origami models are in effect are so many levels of abstraction from the real thing that there are no valid metrics that apply the the “goodnicity” of the rendering. Continue reading
So I have been really busy, with meetings and … stuff, so I fell a little behind. Looking to catch up, I noticed a lovely group of folds designed by David Brill:
This is Cat, Mouse, Cheese – a naturalistic composition with a pair of lovely fold-related critters and a lovely wedge of cheese. Continue reading
Returning to Blade Runner, there has historically been much discussion about the humanity of the central protagonist, Deckard:
Ridley Scott has recently confirmed that Deckard is a Replicant, a point visually reinforced by his recurring dream of “Unicorns” (unreal beasts).
Near the end of the movie, an origami Unicorn is left at the door of his abandoned apartment, presumably by Gaff (although Edward J Olmos says he was not the folder, Scott clearly liked the idea of the echo of an idea). Continue reading
Origami cats are hard – their soft elastic ways are difficult to depict artistically with a medium as stiff and uniform as paper:
This is Christophe Boudias’ “Sleepy Cat”, a lovely model that I think manages to capture the posture of a cat that is cuddling up ready to sleep, tucking it’s little pawsies under its chin. Continue reading
Cautionary advice indeed for anyone who has seen the movie comedy “Rat Race”:
We saw our first live squirrels when we first travelled to the UK, in a lovely park in Holland Park (interestingly the same suburb name we live in now here in Australia).
Lovely little grey filly, impossibly fluffy tail, cutely flitting around in the underbrush. Continue reading
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
Matt and Alix came over for lunch, so nice to have their company (BLATs and an amazing, experimental chocolate souffle):
We ate, talked, played Takenoko – a board game about Pandas and bamboo farming, such cute imagery. I want to say I won, but I played and did my best – that is always good enough. Continue reading
