Challenge #44 is “A Statue of Sasaki Sadako” by Naoto Horiguchi. I looked up her story on Wikipedia, and it’s quite sad. She folded more than 1000 paper cranes before dying at age 12 of leukemia caused by the Hiroshima atomic bomb.

  

My folding wasn’t my best, but you can tell what it is. It’s a very complex model, so I drew in some of the lines in sharpie. I was going to paint it when it was done, but I liked the cartoon look it ended up with. Because of this, I thought it might smear if I used water. I’m not great at the “wet folding” thing, but it probably would have improved the final shaping.

 

It’s pretty cool. The folded legs, which serve as the base, are nearly at the center of the paper. The hands and hair are great aspects, and there are quite a lot of other slick methods to make the details. The crane is a separate piece (mine’s obvious but it’s a little less apparent in the images accompanying the crease pattern).