Cleaning House

I've recently become significantly more involved in OrigaMIT (the MIT origami club) and decided to revisit some designs I had always wanted to fold but had no idea how to approach before. Every time I spend a couple months away from origami, I somehow have a magic breakthrough in some old projects. Most recently this has manifested in some old Satoshi Kamiya designs.

First up was Tenma H7. I found this very well made precreasing guide online:

I have no idea why I was so intimidated by this design before. The pattern is really straightforward in retrospect. Also a side thing I realized while folding it: the pattern is just the structure of the WOSK diagrammed pegasus with a graft.

See the similarity?

Before I realized this however, I collapsed the base from a piece of 10" foil

The precreasing

The Base (with some small mistakes)

But I had no idea how to thin the front legs enough to look correct. However, upon noticing that it was similar to the WOSK Pegasus (which I had never folded before) I realized I could just use a similar shaping sequence. I folded the WOSK Pegasus first to get an idea of the sequence first, and as a gift (but didn't take pictures).

Then I started folding from a 60 cm square of Terry Tissue Foil:

The base wasn't too difficult

Shaping was a mess

One of my favorite Tenma's is Kota Imai's fold. The fold is not that clean, but the head shaping is really good. Another good Tenma is Shuki Kato's fold - the head is more basic, but everything else is basically perfect.

questionable shaping techniques

Here are roughly finished pictures

My goal with this was just to collapse it and shape it relatively simply, so this final product is acceptable to me. I might refold it at some point. I didn't really know how to do the tufts at the front legs like Kamiya, but some random research leads me to believe they're somewhat similar to the structure of the fingers of the wizard from WOSK, so I might have to fold the wizard then return to this again.

Next up!

 About a year ago I folded the diagrammed Bahamut from Works of Satoshi Kamiya Vol 1 and drew up the crease pattern: http://paperviewsinks.blogspot.com/2021/02/bahamut.html

I personally think the original Bahamut kinda sucks - It's too thick and unwieldy in the legs, and too thin in the chest, the legs are too short, and so on. Most of the folds of Bahamut 2.1 look significantly better so I've always wanted to fold Bahamut 2.1, a significant upgrade to the original Bahamut. 

I used to have no idea how to even set up the references. I'm pretty sure they're actually super easy though. The wing graft is a little larger than in the original Bahamut, and now takes up the middle 2/8 of the diagonal:

I've saved the two Oripa files for future reference in google drive here.

I prepared a sheet of wine unryu with Andy (from OrigaMIT). This was my first time treating paper not at home, and I'm not used to using a foam brush which is super abrasive to the unryu (and kept pulling out fibers thinning out the paper), the MC we had was too thin, and the surface wasn't good so the paper  came out very soft. Very subpar. A comedy of errors.

We cut the square using a letter opener and just folding a diagonal producing an approximately 25 inch square. This left the paper with raw edges which was pretty interesting. The paper was was pretty off-square though because of the mess of treating it leading to warping etc but somehow it all worked out.

Working in the OrigaMIT clubroom

The finished product was okay. Because the paper was so low quality shaping the finer parts was kind of a mess and I just rushed through it to get it over with.  I wasn't really sure how to do the wings so I just improvised using the diagrammed procedure. The resulting wings are huge which is nice - If I folded the whole thing more cleanly, then I would probably really like it. This is definitely not my finest work but whatever - I'm glad its done.

see just how massive the wings actually are

I might revisit this in a couple months or so and fold it from a much better prepared piece of paper, and possibly also much bigger (maybe 36 inches?)