There are many subjects for origami models that are sort of a “holy grail” of folding, dragons are one such thing:

This is Shuki Kato’s “Simple” Dragon – the term simple is a relative term, naturally, as most of Shuki’s models are not for beginners and this little charmer is no exception.

I decided to try it on 50cm Daiso origami paper, fully expecting the paper to fail (as it is fairly ordinary wood-pulp paper) but I managed to coax it into a relatively huge dragon that has simple features but recognizably dragony morphology.

Lovely wings sprout from a simple, stubby body with simple legs. the head/tail are long and poseable with a nice set of horns on the head. It is a pity the technique does not reverse the body as there are some model-able features buried in the centre crease that might make nice spikes on the tail. It is a very efficient use of paper so the resultant model is a large proportion of the starting sheet, unlike most.

I decided (rather foolishly) to try this model small also. I had a red double tissue offcut that I carefully cut into a 19cm square and blow me down it if did not accept the folds easily and the resultant cutie is thumb-sized.

I think this dragon is better smaller – cute and poseable but the simple features when seen large make it seem much more basic than it actually is.

This is, of course, window dressing and distraction as I continue to wrestle with Shuki Kato’s “Western Dragon” (you can see attempt #5 in thebackground of the tiny red one) – a model that I have failed to fold 4 times already.

I have a bunch of other dragons to fold also, should be interesting.