Bahamut

 About a month ago, I decided to make Satoshi Kamiya's Bahamut design on a whim. I always hated this design. I'd folded it a few times before from diagrams, but I could never quite get the head right - it was always too small to fold cleanly. I also think the legs and arms always come out very short and stupid looking. I've only seen one or two good Bahamut's out there.

At any rate, after folding the Ancient Dragon from CP a couple times recently, I decided I should also learn how to do Bahamut from CP. First up, I redrew the pattern myself. The reference was some kind of 1/2^n along the diagonal I believe.

The next step was to figure out how to fold the head. The details of the head portion of the CP in the book are very small and hard to see, and several folds are missing from it. The first thing I did was isolate a small portion of the CP involving the head so that I could testfold the base and then use the diagrams to complete the remaining shaping steps:

Shown above is the rough section that I testfolded.

What a clean octagonal sink

The famed "bahamut christmas tree"

Two testfolds I completed

I then decided to try the full design. I didn't know what paper to use, but I remembered I had some black Ikea kraft lying around, so at about 2 AM I cut out a large ~70 cm square. And then I got tired and fell asleep.

But the next day I woke up and actually decided to fold it. The entire process was about 1 full day over winter break.

I didn't take many progress pictures of the early base, so these are all progress steps roughly following the diagrammed sequence (and at some point basically just following the diagrams since the structure of Bahamut is so bizarre that I didn't feel like guessing from the pattern).

By the end, it was getting pretty late since I took many breaks in between (I hate making Bahamuts) so I switched to lamp light.

After a long time fiddling with the wings I got to about the end.

By this point I was pretty frustrated with the design. The legs looked like they would still be short and annoying. Nevertheless I pressed on with the gift of lots of white glue.

Thats all for now. I'm moving to college soon, so I'm trying to get all my winter break posts that I forgot to write finished before I leave. I'll miss California a lot.

Making Paper

NOTE: this is a half written post, which I made to instruct a friend. It's not done yet, but I'm making it public for now so he can read it.

Much of the time I use a paper called Double Tissue for my Origami. It's cheaper than specialty papers, has a much wider array of color options, and isn't too hard to prepare.

Picture to arrive

Like all papers which are prepared on a glass surface with MC, double tissue always come out with one side glossy, and the other side normal (more on this later). This is an interesting property, which may be favorable to you, or maybe not. Even if you don't like it, the paper still has so many benefits, that it's worth learning how to make.

 In this post, I will quickly go over my double (and triple) tissue paper making process.

This post will be split into two pieces: (1) how to prepare the methyl cellulose glue, (2) how to prepare paper, and (3) how to cut paper.

To prepare the paper, you will need

• Methyl Cellulose
• I use this kind. It's not super cheap, and you can probably order it in bulk from other sources, but be warned of possible issues if you try other sources.
• A container to store the Methyl Cellulose that you will prepare
• I use old gelato containers, but jam jars etc. will work fine.
• An (ideally) glass surface. A window will work, but a horizontal one is better!
• Technically a shiny smooth plastic (or possibly other) surface will also work, but I haven't tested mc on those surfaces before. I just use a piece of glass that came with the family coffee table.
• Wide brushes
• I use brushes from this large pack of cheap brushes I bought from michaels. They look like this, but I dont remember the brand anymore.
• I've heard that the kind of brushes you use does matter. If they are too harsh, they can cause the wet paper to tear.
• Two pieces of good quality tissue paper. Ideally you can get the 20x30 inch sheets from local stores, but smaller sizes will still work. They'll just produce smaller papers.
• The kind of tissue paper you use will be pretty tricky to find. Too thin/weak and it will tear when you are preparing it, and too laminated/glossy and the mc won't be able to adhere to the surface through it easily enough causing peeling and warping during the drying process etc.
• I use tissue paper from my local Safeway.
• Some time!
• Preparing paper like this will require around 20 minutes of work (until you get experienced at which point you can probably go faster).
• After that its gonna be several hours to dry.

Okay. Let's make our methyl cellulose mixture. For us, methyl cellulose(MC) will functionally behave as a glue to stick the two sheets together without making the paper too weak and stiff (which traditional glues like white glue would lead too). With more specialized papers like mulberry etc, the mc will strengthen the paper itself (and you'll be able to make single sheets of MC'ed mulberry foldable).

Allegedly, MC clumps less in hot water, but dissolves better in room temperature water. I don't know of this is true (and I'm too lazy to use all that icho experience to figure it out), but it roughly matches with my experience.

1. Heat up 1 cup of water until it is relatively warm (maybe 30 seconds in the microwave?)
2. Place the warm water into the container that you will be using to store your MC in the end. If your container is plastic, you may want to make sure that the plastic won't deform from the heat.
3.  Measure out 1 Tablespoon of MC. Then SLOWLY add in the MC to the warm water(add a very small amount of the measured MC, followed by stirring of the mixture, then another little bit of dry MC, then more stirring of the mixture, repeat). Be very careful about this. If you do it too fast, then you will get clumps. I usually add in the dry MC as 3 teaspoons (which add up to 1 tablespoon) to make sure that I'm not going too fast.
4. Keep stirring just for good measure for a little while longer.
5. It will still be cloudy. Now just seal the container and wait for it to cool. When it has cooled, the MC will no longer be cloudy! I'd guess this has to do with the comment I made above about solubility.

Before we continue, here's a heads up:

Remember how I said that Double/Triple Tissue always ends up with one side glossy? The side that is in contact with the glass surface will come out glossy in the end. This might affect the order in which you decide to place the papers when you're preparing them. For example if you want to mimic kami paper using double or triple tissue paper (i.e. one side with a selected color, the other side white), then you might put the colored paper down first, producing a shiny colored side and normal other side.

Now we're ready to make our paper. (Pictures will follow)

1. Ahead of time, prepare your MC with the steps in the previous section. It'll take a while to cool down, so keep this in mind!
2. Carefully clean the glass surface with water (and soap if you're feeling not lazy). Then dry it.
3. Place your first piece of tissue paper on the glass surface. Remember that this side will end up glossy.
4. Add a layer of MC to it with your brush. I like to make one horizontal stripe of MC across the paper to get it to sit flat, then use vertical strokes on the top and bottom halves separated by the horizontal stripe of MC. Try to avoid wrinkles.
5. If you are using a rectangle shaped tissue paper, for example, 20x30 inches as I do, you should NOT MC the extra part of the paper beyond what is needed to make a square. This will make it easier to pull off the paper later
6. Carefully place the second sheet on top of the (still moist) first sheet. Try to avoid wrinkles. I try to get help from family members with this step (4 hands is better than 2!). You can also roll the paper on a tube (like a clean PVC pipe) and smoothly unroll it over the first sheet if that way is better at preventing wrinkles. I don't have any such tubes sitting around my house though, so I use caveman methods.
7. Add a second layer of MC on the second sheet just for good measure.
8. Wait a couple hours for the MC to dry. I usually leave it overnight. If you pull the paper too early, then it may not be completely dry (despite feeling like it is), which can lead to warping after you've pulled it off.
9. Once the paper is dry, gently hold the portion of the paper which you left untouched (not MCed) in step 4 and use it to peel off the paper. Generally you should not encounter much resistance with this step, although very occasionally it can require a little extra pulling to get the paper off. I'm not sure why this is, but the side that was touching the glass should still be glossy in my experience. This extra resistance edge case can lead to an issue which I will address next.

If when you peel off your paper from the surface, you encounter a lot of resistance, it may lead the paper to start rolling up on its own once you have fully pulled it off the glass. This can be remedied.

Simply take three pieces of string. Roll up the paper in the direction perpendicular to which it is trying to roll, and tie it once around the middle with a gentle knot using the first piece of string. Then, tie the remaining ≈1/4 and 3/4 points for good measure. Let it sit for 10 minutes, then unroll it and see if it has stopped rolling up. If not, repeat the process. If it has started rolling the "perpendicular direction" which you forced it into with the string, just repeat the process but now with rolling in the original direction etc.

If you are experiencing difficulties

• This article might help you: https://wg-origami.blogspot.com/2020/11/warped-and-wrinkled-paper-curse.html

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):

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!

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