Revised Great Blue Heron

2 Years ago, I designed a Great Blue Heron
https://www.flickr.com/photos/136853475@N05/24658105128/in/dateposted-public/

Almost immediately after, I decided I wanted to make one with longer legs and color changed wings. I revised the original design, scaling up onto a 64x64 grid.

Because of the large grid, I decided to start test folding from a 3 foot square (which I made by sticking together four 18 inch squares. This was originally attempted to just be a test fold, so the colors are not the correct grey-blue.

 Unfortunately, in the process of preparing one of the smaller 18 inch bicolor squares, the dye of the black side bled onto the white mulberry side, making the top right corner turn a reddish color.

I decided to continue anyways:

With the base completed, I got to shaping the wings:

After this point, I noticed the seam along the spine of the heron tearing (because the method I used to stitch the individual squares together. Disheartened, I gave up the project for 2 years, until last weekend, I found it again, and tried to fix it.

The first thing I did was to stick strips of new mulberry along the spine in order to close up the poorly prepared paper along the spine.

After several more hours of miscellaneous fixes, I finally finished the entire thing and took pictures:

Here are some pictures of real Great Blue Heron's for comparison:

The first one is in somewhat odd lighting making the gray appear more white and the blue appear more black, so it looks amusingly similar to the colors of my own rendition:

The second is a picture I used for reference in the pose.

Now that the design is test folded, I know that the design works. I now know that I need to properly prepare the paper along the seam if I fold it again. I would really like to do another fold with the same grey blue double tissue that I used on the first great blue heron. Normal double tissue would also be a lot thinner so I could properly fold the curve in the neck. Personally, I don't know if I plan on folding another attempt of this design. I've drafted another Great Blue Heron this month,  but I want to try folding a lot more birds so I would probably end up using a monocolor sheet of paper, rather than preparing 4 sheets of normal size paper and stitching them together (very time consuming), if I folded it again.


As a final note, since I folded it from a 3 foot square, the finished heron is absolutely massive compared to the original:

Some Progress Pictures for an Old Project

A couple years ago I folded my first attempt at designing a great blue heron.
https://www.flickr.com/photos/136853475@N05/24658105128/in/dateposted-public/

2 years ago, I didn't have a blog, so I didn't know where to keep my progress pictures. Now that I have a blog, here are all the progress pictures from that project!

Firstly, folding the base

Preparing the wings:

Turning the pleats into feathers:

Finishing the head:

Here are some more formal indoor pictures in a light box of the finished heron:

Thats all for this post! Thanks for reading!

Another birdie

Hello! It's been a while. For a couple months, I was too busy to post, then too exhausted to post, then too busy to post again. I have still been folding in the meantime though.

I bought some new colors of tissue recently, and there were some really nice fuchsia sheets among them. I decided to use one of them with a green paper to attempt a finished copy of my parrot from earlier this year. The colors seemed to mute each other when I was making the paper, so the green ended up being a little too pastel.

I cut the paper and started gridding it over the course of a couple days.

After the gridding was done,  getting it to the base was pretty quick. As with most of my birds, I was pretty concerned that the wings would be ugly and the body wouldn't work all the way up until I had pretty much finished it. Here are some progress pictures along the way. I probably spent around 2 hours working on the wings, even though I feel like they aren't as visible in the final product

After the wings were finished, I felt a little more confident, and finished up the rest. Here are some pictures of my final bird.

He's got back feathers!

He's got toes!

Overall, I'm pretty happy with what I made this time. I think a lot of my designs have some small flaws. Sometimes the legs are too short, sometimes they're missing details that I had really wanted to include. This one has pretty much everything I wanted about the subject. There is some room to improvement, but I don't think I'm planning any massive redesigns of it any time soon.

I think I could make for an interesting bird of prey with this design. I might even be able to improvise a color change on the head. The parrot tail feathers that I put in this one could pretty easily be changed into more conventional bird tail feathers. I think I would want more feathers on the wings (This one only has about 7 rows of feathers per wing, while some of the other birds I've made, like the great blue heron had about 20).

Thanks for reading!

New Parrot

Over the past couple of days I've returned my attention to birds, and after several possible different bird designs, I finally moved away from the theory and test folded one of them. This is an attempt at a parrot from a 20 inch square of Terry Foil Paper.

It's getting closer to what I want, but I think the head and body still have a ways to go. Maybe with some thinner paper...