—Original Crease Pattern Challenge 69 Post—

I’ve gotten a few people ask me for help on Kakami ‘s Leafy Sea Dragon (CPC 69, OTM 125). I didn’t really remember it, so I folded it again and have some tips here. Although, I think my fold is a little off. Also, this one is purple for Dragalge, a pokemon I like that’s being reintroduced into the game with an expansion! Not that I’m going to get the expansion at that price before I find out if it’s worth it…

Anyway, first, here are the reference points (without the crease pattern). Most people trying this have probably figured them out already, but the inner square’s reference isn’t super standard.

For collapsing, the tail corner is across from the head, and almost all points on either side of the diagonal separating them go towards their respective corner. I picked one of the corners (the tail, but the head should work fine if you want to start there) and collapsed that side moving from the corner in. The edge points are the spines that look like flags, while the interior points become the spines with diamonds underneath the dragon. There are eight of these interior points, but they are paired together to give each of the four spines two diamonds.

The interior points are the ones I did a little off. They collapse opposite the section you’ve already folded (if you went from a corner in, the spine forms with the opposite side of the paper) and must be popped out.

In the crease pattern, lighter lines are mountain folds while darker lines are valley folds. The lines around the points are where the pop out section occurs. They switch between valley and mountain because the fold is through the already folded point. However, there has to be a pair of both valley or mountain folds where the spine folds along. These are the red circled valley folds. I mixed up valley and mountain folds and was looking for a pair at no angle (which I’ve seen more), so I switched the yellow circled section to two valley folds.

This is minor and shouldn’t make the model look different, but I wonder if the other way would lock the two spines together.

Other than popping out the interior spines and the “watch out for” part, I have a couple other minor tips. The tail section seems to have a few unused points in it (I don’t know why). Finally, a paired set of notes: part of the center square sticks out and the lower body curve doesn’t seem inherent to the crease pattern. For both of these, I crimped the tail down after collapsing, and then folded the extra paper inside pockets in the tail while shaping it.

Those are the general tips I’ve got for that one. If you have any other questions on this or others, I’ll be happy to try to help if I can (I tend to be slow tho). Besides here, I’m on Instagram and Twitter, and you can show me what you’ve done on those too!

—Tips on this Crease Pattern Challenge—

Challenge 69 in Issue 125 is Hitoshi Kakami ‘s Leafy Sea Dragon. Kakami also has the website Calico’s Origami Aquarium, which I think I’ve mentioned before. He has a lot of great origami pokemon there. He also did the Coelacanth Crease Pattern Challenge.

This was interesting to fold. On my first run at it, I kept mixing up reference folds/points with folds/points I used to find them.

The thing is, in spite of what they tell you, many origami models will work out fine using really close points that aren’t exact. You may get some edges you’ll need to adjust, but it’s typically not a big problem.

This model is very exact. It’s hard to explain, but each fold’s angles strongly depend on the ones around it. This usually happens in smaller regions that can be shifted slightly around. In this one, basically any shifted line changes the whole thing drastically. It’s really neat.

—Tips on this Crease Pattern Challenge—