Great Egret 2020

The November challenge for the origami-dan discord was "aerial/sky high" so although I haven't designed much in a while, I decided I had to make something before the month ended. I'm in college now at MIT (yay!) so between struggling over math homework and procrastinating with dark souls, I haven't had much time to fold anything.

I've always liked egrets (probably from back when I was a big fan of the great blue heron) and are probably what most people think of when they hear "crane," so I decided to make one.

The underlying structure is not too complex

A 48x48 grid. The head on the left side was a possible adaptation of my great blue heron head, which I ultimately didn't use since I didn't want to mess with any extra thickness. So the actual pattern I folded was that on the right.

I've always wanted to make one of these birds on a large scale, and I didn't feel like preparing lots of mulberry or double tissue, so I just used a 3x3 foot square of tracing paper.

Precreasing was a challenge since I haven't worked on this scale very much, and I use a much smaller table now and have much less space (the 3x3 foot square doesn't even fully fit on it).

Thankfully the collapse was very straightforward

Once I got to the base, I started folding the feathers.

Note that this design is basically inseparable from the use of glue at this size. This is because to make the feather pleats separate properly, I fold the them awkwardly over the actual wing flap. In the past, I have gotten away with not using glue in the wings (for example the double tissue parrot from last November did not need glue in the wings) when the paper is agreeable, but  3 foot square tracing paper is not so good for this.

I made one small mistake in the spacing of the legs relative to the body, so I ended up using glue to push the legs one unit forward (which also lost one unit of length on the legs). Fixing the rivers(? not sure if this is the correct terminology) is relatively straightforward though, so I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader. If you're interested in folding this design, as long as you're ok with using some glue to reposition the two leg flaps, this mistake won't bother you, and you can ignore this whole paragraph of commentary!

At any rate, I'm quite fond of the shaping on the legs. I think they came out quite well anyways.

One particular lesson I learned while making this is that you should always  make sure the legs are a little further forward in the base than what you choose when drawing the tree, or else the tail plume risks looking too short. Also, always make the tail plume longer than anatomically true since for some reason this little bit of trickery makes things (oddly) appear more realistic (at least in my opinion).

Thanks for reading!

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...