Megafauna Origami

As mentioned previously I made some megafauna origami models to donate to the American Museum of Natural History for their annual origami holiday tree. I did three models this year: a moose, an elephant and a bear. All three are made out of large paper and therefore quite big. The moose is made from a 32” square of brown parcel wrap, which was the biggest usable piece I could find. I tried making an elephant out of the same stuff, but I had the idea of wrinkling and then flattening the paper first to give it an elephant hide texture. The paper ended up with a slightly strethcy, almost clothlike consistency. The model is just one layer thick over the whole back, so it came out way to floppy. A very interesting failure. I’ll have to keep the technique in mind for the future. I made another elephant out of a 24” square of Canson, which is a thick art paper and very good for making elephants. Lastly I made the bear out of 15” Tant. I’m quite pleased with how all three came out and I hope the museum will use them well.

As an bonus I am including a pic of a funny little are project Lizzy and Michelle undertook not to long ago. They started making origami boats out of Masu boxes, and then put them together on top of corks.

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