I’ve had the idea for some time to make an origami War Elephant, basically an elephant with a castle on its back, and maybe some bigger tougher tusks and other scary-looking armaments. The main design challenge is how to integrate the castle with the rest of model and still make it out of a single uncut square. The two main options are it would come out of one corner – probably the where the tail would be, or to make it come out of the middle. I’ve been investigating the middle way.
There is a good base for this as it turns out. I don’t know the name of it, but it’s a simple, elegant classic tessellation. Jeanie folded one a few years back and it’s been decorating our sideboard ever since. The tower I had in mind had crenulated battlements ringing the top, and something resembling arches on the sides. I had tried a few other approaches to the tower but none of them was very good. This time I started with just the simple base, and it worked out really well. In this simple tower all the edges of the paper are along the bottom edge, so it should be fairly straightforward to embed it in a larger square.
In fact the cool thing about using a tessellation as a base is that it basically gives you a small square in the middle of your main square. The number, size and position of the small square can be manipulated, so it is very flexible. It also gives these gussets that run along the major axes, effectively giving you four extra points. I might be able to use this make a LotR-style Oliphaunt with four tusks! It also means I can make a bunch of towers together on the same sheet and link them with walls, forming a Castle. I’m thinking of one larger central tower surrounded by four smaller ones.
I hope to finish these experiments this spring. BTW, my book is coming along. I have twelve models diagrammed now, and hope to get to sixteen by the convention in June.
