Fire Wyvern

Designed and folded from a single uncut sheet of 23.75" square red Unryu

When I first began folding super-complex origami of other artist's designs, I was under the impression that most origami designers usually designed a signature dragon model sometime in their life. Of course this isn't necessarily true, but I thought this because there are a bunch of very impressive origami dragons and wyverns (both single sheet and multipiece) out there. If you haven't, check out those made by Joseph Wu, Kade Chan, Satoshi Kamiya(this guy has at least 3 very well known ones), Daniel Brown, and Sebastian Arellano just to name a few. At the time, I thought it would be pretty cool to be able to design an original dragon or wyvern, but since I didn't have the technical skill to actually do it, this remained wishful thinking. Here we are, a few years and a few attempts later I've finally managed to create the fire wyvern seen above. As a fan of the Monster hunter video game series, I have always liked the creature design of the Rathalos, a fire wyvern with a impressive wingspan, plated body, and large claws. Though I initially started out to recreate these features, somewhere along the way the details just sort of took on a life of their own and I just went with it. I was pleasantly surprised by the end result: a distinct, bird-like wyvern (as opposed to a more serpentine one).


Structurally, this design started as a boxpleat pattern built on a 32x32 grid. The base is pretty much built around the pleats that make up the scaled plates that run along the back of the wyvern. As there was plenty of paper allocated the tail, legs and wings, this base was a joy to work with. This wyvern is almost an enclosed model, with only the neck and parts of the wings exposing the opposite side of paper. Surprisingly enough, it's also pretty well-balanced; with some careful work, it's possible to get the wyvern standing only on it's two legs. I think this is probably my first serious work using unryu paper for an original design, for which the cardinal red paper turned out incredibly nice. Methyl cellulose was used to stiffen up key stress points in the paper such as the wing base, legs, and tail. A roughly 24" square gives a model 10" head to tail and a 12" wingspan

A few more angles: cahoonas.tumblr.com/post/57923…
Mini version: cahoonas.tumblr.com/post/58208…
Posed Green version: www.flickr.com/photos/cahoonas…
Crease pattern may be found here: fav.me/d6kuggu