Determined to work on one of my known folding weaknesses (solving crease patterns), I decided to have a go at Riccardo Foschi’s “Black Widow”:

Folded from 4×1 rectangle, box pleating teases out lovely long legs, cephalothorax and abdomen. With a little magic I managed to extend some pincer-like jaws also to use up some of the paper that was otherwise lurking in the transition between the body and the legs, which was quite pleasing.

Half the job is the collapse – working out what should be mountain, what should be valley, and the order of the collapse. The rest of the work (some say the hardest bit) is in the shaping as, often, the base you collapse to only roughly corresponds to the morphology of the final form, you then need to primp, tease, thin and pose to gain model finesse.

I used a little methyl cellulose (MC) to set the shapes of the legs, hold the bulbous abdomen in place and stabilise the head. Otherwise the design is genius. Purists would say you should be able to do this in a SQUARE, and many have, but the long rectangle makes nice thin legs and bulbous body much easier to achieve without all that tiresome layer management and accordion sinking to hide lots of the paper, making the model pretty efficient (that is most of the paper is showing).

I must do some more of his designs, there is an elegant simplicity and almost cartoonish appearance that is appealing.