Origami For Kids

I won’t say this is my favorite model. They are all my favorites while I am working on them. But this Horse--I have been with her the longest, starting I think in 1993. Also I have a set of ideals, almost an ideology, for animal origami design, and this is the model that comes closest to embodying it. 1. It is from a square 2. It uses clean angle divisions (15, 22.5) for all major folds (and most minor ones) 3. The preferred angle basis is 15 degrees (which I happen to like) 4. It uses strict referencing till very late in the sequence 5. The referencing is not artificial, but natural (= few/no extra steps just to make references) 6. The number of folds, given what you get at the end, is small (about 40 for the basic, standing version) 7. For horses in its class, paper usage is highly efficient 8. A quite reasonable model is produced with no post-folding, but material enough is there so that an accomplished folder can sculpt it to his heart’s content 9. Different poses or expressions ar...

I gave in a little too easily a few posts ago to the claim that a bird base doesn’t conveniently allow a two-winged, split back without pre-placement of grafts, etc. Actually here, the desires of the origami designer to show what can be done with points come into conflict with nature’s aesthetics, since most of the time birds are standing around, their wings and tail really are conjoined in one streamlined, seamless unit. But supposing you do insist on showing wing-tips as points—it is not necessary to have them be fully independent. It’s enough to indicate the separation. And if so, a bird base is perfectly adequate to the task. In fact now that I’ve been around the world, so to speak, with fancy bases and fancy variations to them, I keep coming back to simpler things. The traditional bases turn out to do the job better than the fancy ones! Here is that damn plain-vanilla Bird Base again. And this time I think I can illustrate the idea of continuous complexity directly with this mode...

I’m not going to show you two week’s worth of experiments on the Fat Pigeon. My table is littered with bird carcasses, and my brains are in worse state because once I start I don’t stop and now two weeks are gone from my life. The problem, besides the wounded pride hinted at in the last entry, is that I foolishly listened to R. J. Lang two years ago in Barcelona, when he said ‘birds really ought to have their feet point-split’. I disagreed, but out of politeness conceded that “this was at least true for pigeons.” And here was my old Fat Pigeon, standing around pigeon-legged instead of pigeon-toed. Unfortunately the most obvious way of solving this puts a nasty pleat at the edge of the paper; legs and claws can then be made as long as you like. Now, while I dislike box-pleating I am not opposed to it in principle, if the pleats are put to some artistic effect when the time comes. But here the pleated bulk ends up in the worst place, locked uselessly within wings and tail; and to tie up...