This songbird was designed and folded by me in 2024. Even though most of my designs are quite complex, I don´t want to neglect the beauty of simplicity.
Being inspired by Brandon Wong´s Cradinal, I wondered wether it´s possible to implement a geametric pattern in a more detailed bird. It´s an intriguing idea to make a flat base, that opens up to make the model 3d while revealing a pattern.
At first I also tried hexpleating. But in order to make clean transitions between body, legs and wings, I soon settled for boxpleating. I chose book symmetry, because it seemed to be the easiest way to make the pattern on the belly. Then I started drawing a first crease pattern, made a test, redrew it, made another test…
The main difficulty was the transition between head and wings. It needed to be really efficient, otherwise the whole model would be inefficient. Luckily I found a way to overcome this problem.
By now even though the songbird looks simple, it´s more tricky on the inisde, than it might seem at a first glance.
The crease pattern features a 26x 26 grid using Boxpleating. Folded from a 24cm sheet of Kami, the finished model is 13 cm long.
