Joyeux Pâques

Its just about easter time, time for the bunny to come out of his den, see the sunlight, and not care if he can see his shadow or not. I intended to just fold a rabbit and instead ended up with a humanoid rabbit, or the Easter Bunny. For this model, I actually designed using circle packing, which is a very strange and messy method when it come to actually making something. However, it worked. I just put on all of the circles and connected the vertices (centers of the circles) with folds. Here is what I ended up with, including how to get the important folds on the sides. The model does have a strange base, but you can tell where each of the parts come from. After folding the base, the leg section has to be squashed and the head part folded down. Then you can fold the head up and flatten it for the face, and form the tail, legs, arms and ears. the tail is color changed unless you fold the corner over the showing colored section.

Quick, Fish!

This morning, I had one of my first experiences with rapid designing. It is april fool's day, and I decided that I should fold some fish to stick on the back's of my french teachers. The reason is in french, april 1st is "Poisson d'avril", where people stick paper fish on other peoples backs. Anyways, I used those rectangles that I get left over from copy paper (of which I have hundreds). I found out that using half of it works best, so I used a 4.75 by 2.5 inch rectangle. No CP, but I'll try my best at a good explanation. Fold one of the smaller edges over by about an inch. Then fold the corners at the folded edge back at 45° angles, touching on the folded edge. Fold the remaining rectangle section (the part not already folded at all) in half. Fold about a 22.5° angle on the top and bottom, with the angle starting where the 45° angles end. Inside reverse fold along those lines, and fold the flap that is behind as far a possible without adding extra folds. Then make the tail smaller, and you're done! Here is what mine looks like. Not bad for something made from a strange rectangle in 30 seconds.


It is also possible to edit it so that it has fins, a more detailed tail, etc. Because of the simple base, lots of variations are possible! Also, the head color changes if you use non-copy paper.

Harder Than it Looks

After folding the water strider with the extending wings, I really wanted to fold something that transformed in a bigger way. Of course, I thought of the armadillo and started looking it up. It turns out that the three-banded armadillo is the only species of armadillo that can completely roll up into a ball. Thats what I planned to fold, but as it turns out it isn't that easy. You would think that a few pleats on the back to form bands being pulled apart would roll up the body enough for it to fit together, but it turns out that thats now nearly enough. At first, I figured that the un-rollable model that I folded would have to do, until I came up with the idea of using 45° angles instead of pulling apart pleats. Then I'd just have a nice little hinge in the center of the armadillo... Here is the CP that I used.


You can see the 45° angles that I was talking about. The thing is, this model has to be folded from foil or a paper that really keeps its shape well (I used foil sandwiched between kami and tissue paper glued with watered down glue and light brown watercolor paint. Its fun to experiment with materials). The head, tail and legs come easily, but don't forget the color change on the head. Also, adding two pleats on either side of the hinge make the three bands. Good luck!

Spectacled Bear: Jucumari

I was invited to a challenge at the start of the month called the Spectacled Bear War. Oddly enough, I can't find the page that I was originally directed to, on a blog. Anyway, the idea is to fold a Spectacled Bear and certain models will be picked to go to the challenge. There, they will be judged and the winner will receive a painting involving the spectacled bear and origami theme. I also realized that this model can go into the Black and White challenge on the english forum. Here is the CP that I used for the bear:


It is a pretty simple CP, but it includes most of the details other than the head. After folding the head (in the top left corner, by the way) as shown, you need to fold the corner flap about two thirds of the way down, and the the white parts for the top part of the "spectacles". The corner becomes the bottom part. Both parts of the spectacles need to be thinned. After that, you can pull out the ears and flatten the top of the head. Here is what you should end up with:



And by changing the head from 1/4 of the edge to 1/5, you get this:

Finally Back

Its been a long time since I had enough free time to fold something. The beginning of semester homework flow is bound to end soon, and then I'll have time for as much folding as before (hopefully). I designed this model, a water strider, for the flying insects challenge on the french origami forum, as soon as I started looking around for bugs with wings. I wanted something different, and I remembered my brother telling me when I was little that water striders can fly, if they need to. However, usually there are good enough conditions that they can survive without having to fly anywhere.
I originally based this model on a 16:16 grid, but the 32:32 turned out a lot better. Here is the CP.


The only thing about this CP is that there are two extra flaps. The top flaps on either side do nothing but occupy the remaining paper, so you can just fold them underneath the model. The upper flaps coming from the center of the paper make the front legs (I took forever to decide on this. Originally, the first two flaps mentioned were front legs, but they were too thick and long). The other two flaps from the center make the wings, which can either rest on the back or be extended when it needs to fly. Please note that I tried something new, backcoated tissue paper. It turned out better than I thought it would, but I need more glue in comparison to water next time.



In flight: