Month: September 2020

‘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”).