For Hallowe'en this year, my girlfriend gave me an awesome idea for a costume: to dress up as a gigantic origami crane. I immediately fell in love with the idea and began thinking on how I could execute.
We discussed the idea for a bit and initially thought of using fancy printed paper. However, there were two problems with this approach: large printed sheets are hard to source, and when you find them, they cost about as much as a small island. Thus, we went to plan B and settled on making a white crane, thereafter to stamp it with a traditional-looking pattern.
I began by purchasing a few sheets of white poster board at my local dollar store, defending them from the cashier who was on his way to folding and creasing them into a small bag. I then taped a few sheets together, cut the whole thing into a square, and folded a standard crane:
A standard, if slightly large, origami crane.
I made a much smaller model out of regular origami paper and cut it up to figure out how I was going to fit the large-size model around myself. Then, I cut out the center of the huge crane and started working on creating a coffee stick armature to stiffen the model:
Trying to figure out how to make this thing rigid when there's a gaping hole in the middle.
Why, hello!
Adding bracing on the underside. You can also see a brace at the base of the wings.
There is a long wooden dowel in the tail.
Another dowel braces the neck.
Top view; you can't see any of the armature.
We then selected a pattern and cut it out.
My girlfriend sculpted it out of a potato as a test:
Finished potato stamp.
I then made a second version of the stamp out of EVA foam:
The two stamps.
We promptly proceeded... not to use the stamps at all due to time constraints. I did get the wings attached to my wrists using invisible wire though:
Flapping the wings.
A small coffee stick piece was painted white and used as a fishing line anchor inside the wing.
And that, as they say, is that! Here is a timelapse of the whole process, from raw poster board to finished costume.
As kid I always loved origami; my parents still have bags full of my models in their basement. Every few years, I usually read up on where time has taken the art. This time, I was quite surprised - it had been around ten years since I'd last looked into origami, and man oh man have things changed. People like Robert J. Lang and Satoshi Kamiya have taken model complexity to new heights.
Galvanized, I looked up a few instruction patterns and settled on the "relatively simple" task of folding Satoshi Kamiya's "Yellow Bird". (I did not fold it directly from the crease pattern, though that looks like an interesting challenge for next time.) I'm far from completely satisfied with the way the model turned out, especially the toes, but hey it could be worse for somebody who hasn't folded anything other than receipts from the grocery store in ten years.
(The model is on a Lego "frame" so I could take pictures, because I did not wish to glue the underside of the model together to allow it to stand up.)
Yes, those are suppoed to be reverse inside folds on the back of the neck, not mountain folds. I noticed a long time afterwards and haven't fixed it.
