On February 15, Chinese New Year kicks off – 2015 is the year of the Goat, but a sheepie is close, right? I thought I would take a preemptive strike given that I am sure to be really busy at work by then.
The latest Tanteidan magazine features diagrams for Beth Johnson‘s Sheep – a lovely 2 part model and I was itching to give it a go. Continue reading
I will say it, I am an out and proud Harry Potter fan. Amongst the fantastical beasts that exist in the potterverse is a Hippogriff:
Manuel Sirgo is a talented designer and this is a masterful use of (an albeit fraking huge bit) paper.
I am so glad I started large (45cmsquare brown kraft) as some of the wrangling to make the head and feet was pretty intense.
This odd critter is part “griffin” part horse – claws at the front, hooves at the rear, wings and a bird-like head – weirdly wonderful.
I like that the paper is so dense it ends up being free-standing, the wings spread majestically and I am pretty happy with my first fold of it. More importantly, I learned a new trick to spread/stretch and twist stickey-outey bits to get more paper for a hood/hand which will be handy for making other models more details I suspect.
For me the sounds of summer always include the trill of cicadas:
This is Robert Lang’s “Periodical Cicada” which is similar to the adult form we hear but rarely see. They spend most of their lives underground, emerge as wierd wingless mutants, clumb up something and moult, leaving the most beautiful exoskeletons behind.
Many a summer day was spent as a kid collecting these and terrifying my sister with them … well, kids are kids I suppose.
There is much to admire about this fold – the layer management, proportions of body to wing and ensuring there was enough for some lovely legs is one amazing design. Folded from an ebook on my iPad (why have I not been doing this before???), it was a nice way to spend an afternoon whilst an afternoon storm rolled in. I folded it big (60cm square) and cannot imagine folding it much smaller without extraordinary paper.
It is a relief to have achieve this, as I had a model fail before it (a hand-drawn set of spanish instrucitons started out a bit iffy and after 2 hours went nowhere – you get that sometimes).
Now it is a pubic holiday here in Brisbane for the RNA, and rather than do something show-related, I thought I wold “treat” myself to a Satoshi Kamiya model:
Mistake # 1 – ignoring the suggested paper size – I Folded this from an 18cm square, suggested minimum was 35cm – lol. It became increasingly obvious as I got further and further into this torturous fold that scale was an issue, but I soldiered on with my fat and clumsy fingers.
Budding Scientists: What is wrong with the picture above? )Answer follows*.
So much paper torture but the result, from the outside is actually fairly simple in appearance. I like the body proportions, and the modelability of the eyes and head (difficult to see at this scale). It is a pity this model is not free standing (I had to use a blob of blutac and a bent paper clip as support).
This fold was great for a bunch of reasons, including the exacting nature of the pre-creasing (half millimeters count … mistake #2), a stonkingly difficult sink half way in which baffled me for nearly an hour as I unfolded, refolded and wondered how the layers would ever sort themselves out.
I am happy with this as a first fold, and will fold this model again with a larger format paper. I did not use copy paper but figured with 120 steps, tissue foil was probably the way to go as some of the primary creases get major fatigue.
*Worked out what was wrong with the second picture? It is a WELL recognised fact that TRexes NEVER ate paper, silly.
Now I like a good challenge, but this was a little beyond the pale:
I have seen photos of this model less than half as big and I am buggered if I can work out how you could fold it that small as I struggled at this scale.
A fascinating exercise in box pleating that makes the peggy things and the pitty things on the same surface of a page, then bending it into a self-locking box – wow!
I can see how this could scale infinitely, adding rows of pegs and pits but I am glad I chose only 2 of each as this alone took me an age to nut out – I had a practice with each component first (the site I found it suggested this was a good idea (well, at least I think it did, I cannot read Italian very well.
Why lego? Well, I have been playing with lego robots for a week or so in prep for a robotic unit with year 10 students – lots of fun.
You should have a go at this yourself here
