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!

Smilodon and Inoshishigami

I recently discovered that Daiso sells very nice 12 inch packs of "Colored Paper". I had been looking for 50 cm Kami (don't ask), but I couldn't find any. Instead, I did notice this unusual pack on the shelf.

It has some fibers in it, but I don't think it's any kind of specialty paper (mulberry etc). Much more likely that they just add in extraneous fibers in the machine manufacturing process because they know origamists like them. Nonetheless, the so called "colored paper" is a joy to fold and extremely great quality - I really hope they continue making it. This paper will probably motivate me to fold smaller designs a lot more since I won't have to go through the exhausting paper preparation process for every 22.5 design I want to try and I imagine that I'll bring some to college with me next semester.

Here are two recent Kamiya folds from Daisos "Colored Paper". These are my first attempts at both.

First off, we have the Smilodon from WOSK 1 (from 12 inch orange Colored Paper):

Figuring out the back legs was a bit tricky, but I managed it in the end. Using a little white glue to stick the layers together and make the legs/body more rigid worked wonders.

Next we have the Inoshishigami, or Divine Boar also from WOSK 1 (from 12 inch black colored paper):

The starting paper was just a bit off square, but I've gotten better at working with that kind of inaccuracy nowadays, and I managed to reach the base relatively neatly anyways. A little white glue in the legs and between the two big head flaps helped to get the entire body to stay in place.

I can't wait to see what else I can make from this Daiso colored paper. It's so nice!

Carnotaurus-Satoshi Kamiya

Over the past two years I've become more and more busy, and my new schedule makes it more difficult for me to make polished and practiced final folds for my Flickr Gallery. Nowadays after folding a test fold from test paper, I usually move on to the next design I've happened upon. But these test folds don't seem like they really belong on my Flickr gallery, so I've decided to create this blog for me to post all the little things I work on or fold in little updates (although most likely nobody except me will bother reading it).  At any rate, it will certainly be something interesting to look back on in a couple years.

So I recently found some time to attempt the Carnotaurus diagrammed in Works of Satoshi Kamiya (Vol. 1). I have attempted it once before, out of 6-inch tant (not ideal, I know), but the result wasn't exactly pretty. This time around I chose a much more suitable paper:  an 18 inch square of Masking Paper. This paper is a really good all  round test paper, and I'll probably write about it later.

This attempt started off much more promising than the last. I was careful to  make each crease as accurate as possible.

I forgot to take more in between pictures though (oops, I'll probably get to that next time) until I got to an almost completed base:

There was a little hiccup in the arms; I could not figure out how the arms were being swiveled into position, but I just applied a technique from shaping to get it done a different way with similar (I hope results)

This point was really exciting. The fold was coming along really cleanly despite the significant number of steps involving folding through layers that adds onto paper creep inaccuracy.
Maybe 30 minutes later, I was (mostly) finished:

This is the product I obtained without any embellishments or glue. I was pretty pleased with the result and impressed that Kamiya had designed it to stand up without supports. Things like that require very careful management of layers/paper usage and are a testament to his skill.

But the paper was still thin, and there was a crease going through the upper thigh  that was causing the legs to splay and fall so I decided to  add a little glue for display longevity

The final product is now sitting on my desk and I will update this page when I photograph it.

Edit (10/10/18)
Here's a photo (a little poorly lit :(  )