The Dragon by Seiji Nishikawa is Tanteidan’s Crease Pattern Challenge #14. You might be thinking, “Wasn’t that challenge #6?” #6 was “Ryuu” (龍), an eastern style dragon with the Japanese word for dragon, and this one is “Dragon” (doragon/ドラゴン) , to indicate a more western style. He is also more of a cartoon dragon, because he stands upright, like Charizards, Great Dragons, or Ice Dragons.
This crease pattern actually leaves out quite a few details, but that’s kind of a necessity because the folds double back quite a lot. That is, with all the details it would be a tangled mess to figure out, but, after folding the crease pattern for the initial shape, it should be easy enough to figure out with the final picture. Naturally, I first folded this without looking at the picture.
He came out longer and more wyvernish than the original. While looking back at the final model during folding, I got:
These make his body look more like the wyvern, but that’s only because the legs keep spreading from the center. Most of the features are very different, especially the head, which has eyes and a horn now. In any case, this illustrates the stylistic range you can get out of this crease pattern, and that’s pretty cool.
I also folded this one from diagrams in Works of Seiji Nishikawa, but that was a while ago. I have one that’s red (but only pictures) and one painted like the crease pattern ones. I wasn’t sure these were this dragon until I folded the crease pattern one. This is because of the tiny arms. I’m not a fan of these arms. T-rexes have bigger arms.
For some other Nishikawa models, I thought it would be neat to do some other fantasy creatures, like his Pegasus, or Godzilla. But, since I already did that with the last Nishikawa crease pattern, I’m just going to do his half of Origami Insects Vol. 1.
Fumiaki Kawahata did the first half of this book’s models, and Nishikawa did the second. There are 8 total, so I’m just going to list them and show them in order.
Japanese Horned Beetle – Male
Japanese Horned Beetle – Female
Asiatic Locust
Flying Asiatic Locust
Long-Horned Beetle
Lucanus Stag Beetle
Goliath Horned Flower Beetle
Hercules Giant Beetle
Additionally, Kawahata did something pretty cool with his models that weren’t included on Nishikawa’s. Taking the edge of a square as length 1.0, he showed each model next to a scale as a fraction of this. That way, you’ll know the size of insect you’ll end up with. Similarly, I took end model scans of each Nishikawa insect to show the scales of the models I got below.
Caged Scorpion Origami 