Red Panda

Origami, Original Designs

I’m trying the mobile thing for this one, yay!

Anyway, if you’re doing “traditional” origami, you only have one square and thereby two possible colours (the front side’s and back side’s colours). I’m not exactly attached to traditional style though. For more colours, you can paint the model or use more sheets of paper.

I’ve seen lots of 2 (or more) square origami (like some of the models in “The Beauty of Origami“), but not many complex ones. So I decided to make a semi-complex, 2 square red panda. The white is on both squares, so it’s 3 colours. One square is 2/3rds the other. I think it’s the red one (but I don’t have my notes right now).

Yosuke Muroya’s Wolf – Help with crease pattern

Origami

This is pretty wordy, but I can’t think of any way to avoid it.

A user named Nyaalice asked for help with Yosuke Muroya’s Wolf by crease pattern on Reddit. The only comment (as of now) was something along the lines of “you should pay someone to help you”. Which is fine, I guess, but it seems strange in a subreddit with “Help!” flair.

That being said, it’s an odd model. The crease pattern and finished model image are both on flickr. It looks like something originally done by steps/diagrams rather than just collapsing a crease pattern. It usually takes luck to back-solve steps, so I can only do reference points/lines and tips for folding (the biggest two tips are at the end).

  1. Fold and unfold the diagonal, angle bisectors, and a diagonal that connects them (you can see it there).
  2. Fold and unfold the corner to the intersection shown (from the previous step), then to this new intersection.
  3. Fold the edges parallel to the center diagonal starting at the bisectors-edge intersections.
  1. Connect these previous two folds.
  2. This is a bit odd, but you can see the distance to the nearby parallel crease is the same distance as that one is to the next. I crimp the previous two then fold down to get it.
  3. Fold parallel creases (from 1 and 3) to align.
  4. Connect these intersections. This will mirror folds on the other sides of the folds from 6.

Those are the main reference creases; other lines are largely diagonal halves or quarters of some combination of these folds.

Finding where (most of) the creases are isn’t really the difficult part of the model though, so I have some tips on how to fold it. The model doesn’t specify its folds polarities (mountain or valley), so I want to clarify that my tips are at least somewhat subjective. Also, hope I’m not stepping on any toes by including sections of the original crease pattern.

First, some general tips:

  • On his crease pattern, the head is the top right corner, and the tail is at the bottom left.
  • Precrease all around the front legs and the just before the head (between the folds in my second precrease image) then unfold. Start collapsing from the back legs.
  • The side flaps (precrease pic 3) can be folded under/inside and ignored.
  • The tail and leg section need inside reverse folds/sinks to separate them. Conversely, the bisectors near the head should mostly be kept folded while the head is folded.
  • I don’t exactly know how the tail is supposed to work, so I just winged that (wung? idk).

Biggest Tips:

In my opinion, there are two difficult sections in this crease pattern: The crimp near the center and the two “sinks” to the side of this.

The Crimp:

It helped me to precrease this section separately before folding (either way, here’s the logic). For now, ignore the “sinks” to either side of this section. Fold the red lines as a crimp with the bottom and top ones valley folds and center as mountain. The head/neck starts as the double outside reverse fold of the green highlighted ones (I don’t know the exact placement but just ballparked them).

While doing the outside reverse fold, fold the center diagonal as a valley fold and the parallel ones to the sides as mountain. With this, the crimp section will line up with the body, but it will interfere with the rest of the model. The blue lines are actually one fold, a similar double outside reverse fold, to line it up with the neck and get it out of the way. This is why there’s a small square in the middle: when the head is folded back inside and out, the top of the crimp is folded with it.

The “Sink”:

Note the quotation marks. These look like traditional “sink in and back out” sections. However, they don’t seem to be (certainly not in a traditional sense). Rather, when you fold the body and legs, they don’t line up exactly with each other. These are initially folded in the center, and then folded back and forth as a group to line up the internal and external. I suppose this doesn’t sound too on the ball or whatever, but I folded the surrounding sections (first the tail and back, then the front legs, and then the internal crimp and neck) and just messed with the model a bit to get it to fit, assuming the internal would work out like the pattern. That’s probably not true, but there’s a good chance the original artist did the same initially.

It’s still tricky, but knowing how most of it works with some trial and error will hopefully produce a wolf.

Archdemon Update

Origami, Original Designs

I’ve probably already said, but, whenever I make instructions for an origami model, the model is updated and changed. Here’s the more structurally uniform Archdemon!

This is one of the models that looks better with specific painting for the different aspects. Because painting after folding can be difficult and cause the model to stick to itself, I made an additional page of instructions for pre-painting this time.

I don’t actually know if anyone is interested in folding archdemons (or most of what I come up with, really), so the instructions aren’t here right now. I mostly make diagrams because I’m afraid I’ll forget how I did it. I can make lots of archdemons now!

Tiger Lotus Shoes

Other Stuff

It’s been a bit since I posted stuff here. Besides general stuff, I got some kind of hand eczema and broke my arm. So that’s fun. But I’m back for… well, a couple of posts at least.

The first one is non-origami. One video game character has some shoes I like, and I had some super cheap shoes I never wear. I took those apart for the rubber sole parts, made and modified a pattern off of the pieces, and put together new shoes.

Probably the hardest part was figuring out how to paint the rubber (the upper black line was originally red). I think it turned out pretty well for a first try at it.

Alice

Origami, Original Designs

Here’s a short one for Halloween. I tried to do a human figure, sort of like Takashi Hojyo’s ones off of a grid. I was going for Alice from “Alice in Wonderland”, but she’s proportioned kind of tall for a little girl (I think?). Anyway, I still kind of like how she came out.

‘I’iwi

Origami, Original Designs

The ‘i’iwi  is a Hawaiian bird that’s mainly red with black wings and tail. It’s a bit different than what I usually make.

There’s a strange story with this one. A couple of weeks ago, I was half listening to news in the background and heard about paperwork to a covid vaccine. I think? It sounded like they said you need a form or something called an “e-way”. A few minutes after that, I thought of the ‘i’iwi bird (it’s pronounced like “e-e-vay”, sorta similar).

So, I got this picture of the bird reading paperwork on a laptop.

I made another for diagram steps that’s yellow and black instead. There’s got to be another honeycreeper or other bird that looks like this. The eyes are different with a colour change, which is more like other honeycreepers I’ve seen.

Opossum

Origami, Original Designs

I was making a cheetah; got the head but was having trouble with the body. After one of the bodies didn’t work too well, I thought, “I should make a lizard”. My first lizard head was too pointy (or maybe my second one was after my first one was too wide?). It looked more like an opossum head. There aren’t too many origami opossums, so here we are.

It came together pretty much with the first try. The only things that needed work were details and how to best fold it. In spite of it looking simple, there are a lot of sinks and unwraps, so it’s a bit complicated. Working out the best way/order for the tricky parts was interesting.

The first model only had 4 toes. After excessive googling showed all opossums have 5 toes, I decided to add one. While I thought this would be a pain, it was easy and gave the opossum a more sharp head-fur-thing.

So that was good, but he ended up kind of thin. I told myself that was fine for a bit, then remembered I had some excess paper tucked away. The first try had an odd horizontal division line, but that was easy to fix.

That was my opossum odyssey. I should go back to the cheetah sometime, but I thought of a few other things to go for first (maybe I should just settle for “nice cheetah head”).

Random stuff – August 2020

Miscellaneous, Origami

Well, awhile ago my flash drive died (quite thoroughly), and I lost a lot of recent stuff that I hadn’t backed-up yet. That and some other stuff bummed me out, but I hadn’t realized I’d been off here for so long. So here’s some random, fun stuff.

I made Satoshi Kamiya’s Winged Kirin/Qilin! I think it came out ok. I used paper that’s too small again.

There’s an artist named Hachiken (Haruka Hashimoto) on Twitter. I love their Blastoise, and there’s a crease pattern. So I made one; he’s great!

I wonder if I should make the Charizard too?

…got sidetracked while writing this and made him in the interim. He’s great too! The way I painted the square caused the paper to be a little thick, so I had some trouble getting the tail and wings to stay up.

Last, Paper Mario: The Origami King came out a few weeks ago now. I unraveled (and re-raveled) my Bowser to possibly do diagrams of him sooner or later. Also, I made Nintendo’s origami Princess Peach from the how-to video on their Japanese website. I used her, my Bowser, and some game sprites to try greenscreening and make a little cartoon. It’s kind of dopey, but I hope it makes someone smile.