Ancient Dragon Alduin version

Merry Christmas! 

My last post was about folding an earlier version of the Ancient Dragon.

http://paperviewsinks.blogspot.com/2020/12/ancient-dragon-10.html

I only just realized how much more enjoyable it was to fold the ancient dragon from the pattern. I had previously despised the design because I hated how much of the precreasing had to be done on the fly. I've always wanted to make an ancient dragon from a 3 foot square, and decided that now was a good time to attempt it.

I used a 3 foot square of tracing paper (not ideal paper choice, but easier to prepare than a 3 foot square of special mulberry paper).

The precreasing process was very challenging and took about two days (not consecutive since I actually started this a while ago). Tracing paper picks up stress marks really easily, and the large size of the paper made it hard to flip over the paper without leading to annoying crinkles.

The early base came along very easily thanks to the large size.

The late base took about another hour. I've included items for scale.

Now came time for shaping. I've always really liked this interpretation of the Ancient Dragon (the so-called "Alduin" version) inspired by Kamiya's own 2017 refold of the classic design. I've always wanted to make one of my own, so I decided to attempt something like it this time.

The basic structure of the legs of the modified shaping is pretty easy to replicate, then once I had chosen the places I wanted to leave the leg shaping folds I began gluing. I brushed glue between each layer, and then with the help of some clips, allowed the paper to dry into its final shape.

I repeated this process on the forelegs, and used a piece of string to hold them in roughly the right position so they wouldn't splay overnight

I've omitted describing the process of shaping the tail since it was pretty boring. I just folded lots of pleats through the tail flap.

The next morning (this morning) was Christmas! I got up and immediately started working on it again.

I still needed to do the head, neck, and put glue in the top piece wings so the layers didn't separate along the top edge.

The first thing I did was put pleats in the neck. I didn't put any glue in the neck (or the tail) because I think that the tracing paper would have wrinkled too much if I had tried that. Glue tends to work poorly on tracing paper when there are places that are only one or two layers thick.

Then I began shaping the head. To do this, I put glue in between each layer of the horns, and did the eye shaping as I normally do. Typically, I skip all the horn and head thinning steps since they take a long time for a mild improvement, but this time I was dedicated to the task at hand, so I actually did the horn thinning last night before I began shaping. I still skipped the head thinning steps though and just used my own eye shaping from the previous Ancient Dragon and God Dragon Bahamut.

The last thing to do was the wings. I chose not to attempt to replicate the wings from the folds (by Ji Woo Han and Kamiya respectively) I showed earlier in the post since I was pretty sure they would not work very well from tracing paper without lots of glue which would lead to unsightly wrinkling. So I just did some basic ancient dragon wings. To prevent the layers from separating, I placed some glue on the thin strip near the top of the wings, as well as a little where the claw point begins.

At this point I was basically done. There's more that I could do, but I have many things I'm interested in making, so I didn't bother doing any more detail work.

The legs are quite detailed. I really liked how they were done in Ji Woo Han's original fold, so I replicated them in my own. Pardon any close up messiness - tracing paper handles varying layers very poorly.

And of course, here's a picture of the whole Ancient Dragon family. I also have a testfold from 19 inch test paper which is now almost 5(?) years old, but it was just made to test the diagram sequence before I made the red version from 24 inch mulberry in my sophomore year of high school a while later, so I usually leave it out of pictures.

The blue one is from 18 inch Mulberry, the red one is from 24 inch mulberry, and the new one is of course 36 inch tracing paper. I'd love to refold it out of mulberry, but have no idea how to prepare a 3 foot square that would work nicely for something with diagonal symmetry (usually I just stitch four 18 inch sheets together, but I'd rather not do that for something like the ancient dragon). I'm also almost out of red mulberry (which World Market no longer sells!), so I'd either have to do it out of another color (which would consume a large amount of my limited world market mulberry supply, or require me to make a trip to PaperTree to buy 6 dollars worth of unryu for just this one project). Paper is expensive and hard to find!

Ancient Dragon 1.0

I've always wanted to fold Kamiya's Ancient Dragon from its crease pattern, but never had any idea how to start. I had no idea how to find the references (I always assumed they were too complicated to be worth figuring out even though I had the diagrams). Then a couple weeks ago while looking up the original ancient dragon I found this:

In the corner of the google search is a picture of what looks to be a crease pattern challenge for the ancient dragon. Here it is a little bigger:

Now if you look closely, you'll realize this isn't the same ancient dragon design as the one in WOSK 1. This ancient dragon only has 3 fingers on each hand! The diagrammed version has 4. The official CP of the diagrammed version also shows all the open sinks used to thin flaps (as well as an extra pair of angle bisectors in the head foreleg connection).

However looking at the cp of this original ancient dragon, and the cp of the diagrammed version, I realized the underlying reference was the same for both. The only real difference was the number of pleats used to form the fingers. I still didn't seriously consider folding it at this point, but I was interested by how simple the pattern looked from this point, but I wasn't sure if I could figure out the references.

A couple days later though I was having trouble sleeping, so I got up at 2 AM and decided to try redrawing the pattern myself and managed to figure it out (basically) entirely. Here are the notes I made in case they help any readers of the blog.

First off, here is a quick guide showing how all the basic skeleton components of the pattern are precreased starting from the numbered references (1,2,3)

I then filled in the rest of the pattern:

I realized how simple the design was to actually fold from pattern. I'd guess its even easier than Bahamut BL, which is amusing since the Ancient Dragon is supposed to be the more advanced pinnacle of Origami design.

It was at this point that I started considering actually folding the ancient dragon again. I'd folded it once before from diagrams, and absolutely despised every moment in the folding process. It was the kind of design I would fold once to get over with since the end result is so iconic, but never again. Largely this was because a lot of the steps in WOSK involve folding through multiple layers, or folding with multiple disorganized layers underneath, and it becomes extremely difficult to fold neatly. 

Seeing the crease pattern this way made me realize how easy it was to just precrease and collapse it myself, thus eliminating the need to follow another boring 300 steps diagram. I also mildly dislike divisions into thirds (which are necessary to fold the 4 toes of the diagrammed ancient dragon). This one just requires some perpendicular bisectors to make 3 toes, so it seemed much less annoying.

I immediately decided to procrastinate on my history paper due the next day, and prepared a piece of 18 inch mulberry that I had found sitting in my bookshelf while cleaning stuff out.

The precreasing process took almost exactly one hour, and was well worth it for the convenience it added to collapsing.

This is probably the most iconic base in all of Origami (with possibly the exception of Ryujin). I would guess that any origamist who sees it will immediately know what's to come.

The head was collapsed pretty quickly since I had precreased so much of it ahead of time. After some rearrangement of flaps, the base was complete:

I consulted the diagrams a bit to remember how to shape the wings, and what direction to open the pleats in the fingers (which are done the same way as Kamiya's wizard)

At this point, I just shaped it really quickly without glue. Precreasing took an hour, collapsing was about an extra hour, and I'd guess shaping took about another hour. I ended up being satisfied with the result, so no glue was used at all in this fold!

I left it in a standing-ish pose since I didn't want to compress the legs - the smaller number of toes also makes each individual toe longer.

With some glue, I could probably have cleaned up some of the open pleats in the legs, but I think these are details which are not worth losing the status of "no cuts no glue". In  person I feel like most people won't notice such issues. I'm not much of a purist and don't care if yo use glue (I use it a lot!), but I do think its very amusing to be able to make the ancient dragon, the poster child of super complex origami, to (I think) a relatively good standard while strictly adhering to the no glue rule.

Lastly here's a picture of the family all together. It's amusing how much less size efficient the Ancient Dragon is compared to Dragon God Bahamut (pink) - both are from 18 inch squares of Mulberry but Bahamut dwarfs the blue Ancient Dragon. To get to the same scale, the Ancient Dragon has to be made from a 24 inch square (the red one):

Bahamut BL

In 1997, Kamiya designed God dragon Bahamut, known more commonly as Bahamut BL on origami forum for some reason (presumably because it is meant to resemble the iteration of Bahamut depicted in the cover art for the game Bahamut Lagoon). The design is a mashup of the original Bahamut and the Ancient Dragon (or rather the other way around since it predates the Ancient Dragon, and possibly also the original Bahamut). It has the Ancient Dragon head, but the general structure of Bahamut.

 I've folded this design once before.

At the time I remember being seriously confused by several parts of the crease pattern.

This part in particular probably sticks out to anyone who has tried collapsing this design. I showed it to Eric, an origami friend from high school, who replied:

I think this is a quite apt description.

The reason I chose to revisit this design is because I actually bothered to read the paragraph about the design on Kamiya's website this time. Translated with Google, it reads:

"You can see that there is a structure similar to the ancient dragon from the head to the legs. The area around the base of the wing is supposed to be good, but it should fold up properly. The tail part is also characteristic and I personally like it. 1: 1: 1: 3: 2"

Basically the design is on an 8x8 grid, which is very nice. None of this is particularly eye opening if you read the description, but I had completely forgotten this from the last time I folded it. Presumably I read this last time, but I guess I had forgotten. Knowing the references were so simple made me more interested in trying to collapse it again.

First off, I redrew the important parts of the pattern in Oripa. Here's the pattern with grid sizes of 2,4,8 in case you find them helpful. You can click on the image to make it larger.

I remember the tail portion was extremely confusing last time, and I've become a little obsessed with finding elegant collapsing sequences for stuff recently, so I decided it was worth a try to see if I had improved.

When choosing paper, I knew that I would want to use something larger than a 12 inch square. (the leg pleats get pretty small). I only had a couple pieces of double tissue lying around and they seemed too thick to use. I also had three sheets of sized mulberry - one was cream, one was yellow, and one was hot pink. Naturally, I chose the hot pink.

Here are some progress pictures of the collapse:

The aforementioned weird chest region was collapsed through clean mushing.

The shaping process took many days. I decided to leave the shaping mostly bland - most of my interest in this design was proving to myself that I could collapse all of it (with the exception of the weird wing head connection) cleanly, so trying to be very expressive would have obscured the purpose (and I might have done it poorly since I'm no shaping legend).

Here's an image of the underside, since I think it came out pretty nicely.

And of course I have to include a picture with its big brother - the original ancient dragon[1].

I think it's pretty funny that the past couple posts have been me struggling over basic 22.5 cps, meanwhile something like this seems extremely straightforward to me. Just a random thought. Thanks for reading!

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lD_ag67tH3I