Habitat for Origami

This is an art project given as a gift; it consists of a number of origami animals from different habitats, as well as said habitats for the animals to frolic on. Each habitat is a watercolor painting (my first ones since high school) on some heavy paper. Most standing animals are glued to a base which contains a magnet; you can then place a magnet on the back of the habitat to set animals in whichever formation you desire and stick it on the fridge.

Origami Reindeer

Made this Christmas Eve as part of a reindeer-making celebration. I thought Christmas was either about family, Jesus, or presents, but apparently it is all about picking a medium and making reindeer to go next to the Christmas shrub (again, I thought one had a tree but I can see how this is hard in a small place). This folding was somewhat annoying.

Now, this was supposed to be made from foil and after the fact I can see why. In the center of the torso, and in the head, it is probably 10 or more layers of paper thick. Very hard to work with - I mostly gave up on the final shaping steps of the legs, head, torso, and horns. It was folded with an offset waterbomb base, leaving 1/6 or so of the paper hanging off the side which was later (through a very arduous process) turned into antlers.

I was also expecting it to be somewhat difficult, as it appeared as one of the last models in the book, but I realized it wasn't so much difficult as time consuming. I think there was only one sink fold in the model, and there were no funny twist folds or petal folds involving many layers.

I Tried to Make an Origami Turtle but All I Made Was a Mess

Origami instructions you don't want to see: "Divide again, getting sixteenths." Followed by "One more time, getting thirty seconds." And note that this still left room on the side for seven more divisions, getting a total of thirty nine pinch creases along the top and bottom of the page.

Of course, this was followed by "Divide each of the gaps along the bottom edge in half." Here was where I wisely said "no" and simply marked the places I would need on the page. I wish I had done it sooner—the marking instead of folding—so my turtle would look healthier than this:

Turtle that looks more like a dinosaur of some sort.

All of this folding was just needed to get eleven parallel diagonal lines in teach of three directions (horizontal, and two diagonals). Without a ruler. Yes, instructions are provided which divide paper into 39 even sections without a ruler. Like so:

Just the two sets of diagonals. You can faintly see the pinches along the edge forming 39ths.

All of these folds are to form the lines on which three scales lie, as well as defining lines for scales formed later in the folding. Sadly, something went wrong in my creasing, pleating, or temperament (the most likely candidate) and I ended up with two scales, paper that didn't lie flat, and squished edges. To make the pleat, you have to fold everything at once - six edges for each hexagonal scale (which are all pleats, so twelve folds each) and three scales, plus some extra folds, leads to a very confusing diagram with arrows pointed everywhere.

It looks kinda squished because it is. Ideally, every fold would be firm and perfect. This is not an ideal turtle.

I may try this again and use the ruler-and-pen method or I may just fold a scaled model that uses all of the prefolds, not upsettingly few of them. All told, this took about two hours from start to "finish".

Wooly Mammoth

RAWR - tiny sized. 6" foil sheet.

I don't know how you would make this without a foil-backed sheet - there are a lot of crimp folds that went halfway through the model (normal paper will tend to get ugly crinkle lines) and a lot of very fine folds (foil is thin enough that you can work through many layers without anything slipping). I am very pleased with the final result; you can't really undo any mistakes in foil and I stupidly didn't do a dry-run of the model in normal paper. Luckily, there weren't too many tricky folds except the final shaping folds, which I bluffed my way through with the power of foil. 

For instance, the trunk was supposed to be bent using three successive crimp folds in a line. Very hard to do when the paper has that many layers, but foil just bends into place without needing actual folds. The final thinning of the tusks was done with a knitting needle to put a crease down the center and then I finished the fold with my fingers - tweezers may have worked better, but were not at hand.

Origami Goatfish

Non-food tonight. I got two new origami books in the mail, both by Lang. One was purchased solely for this design of a Koi (complete with scales). I started off on the "easy" end of the book with the Goatfish. Easy, of course, was a very relative term.

My camera isn't so good at these shots

For reference, I used a 6" piece of paper to start with, pictured above. While there was no single fold that was difficult, this model had a lot of crimps, squashes, and pulling out of internal layers. The number of points on the final model is astounding - it started with a simple bird base, and went from there. Actually, it was refreshing to fold something this detailed and not have to make a single sink fold.

For reference as to how much my folding could improve (in addition to my camera), see Lang's original. Note that the prototype linked is missing the fins behind the gills (hard to make out in my photo).