This is the giant Montroll stegosaur which I made out of 9-foot (2.75 meter) photographic backdrop paper. This was discussed on the Origami-list a week or two ago, and I decided that I had to try it. So last weekend I drove over to Zeff Photo Supply in Belmont, MA, where I explained my requirements. The good people there were quite intrigued, and we dug out several rolls of the wide stuff. (They had twelve-foot wide rolls, too, but only in white, and I decided that nine feet was quite enough madness to start with, thankyouverymuch. That was a very sane decision.)
Just cutting a square off the roll was an operation in itself. These first pictures show that: as you can see, it took up a good part of my living room, and in fact I couldn't lay the piece out flat, there wasn't a square area large enough: I had to lay everything just so, and flop over one corner to avoid the couch. The initial folding steps had the same difficulty, so getting to that first preliminary-fold with the extra creases took something like two hours. That was probably the first 90% of the difficulty... don't worry, at this scale of origami, there are several more 90% pieces of difficulty! All in all, I'd say this project added up to easily 300% or more...
Note: all of the pictures below are clickable links to bigger versions of the same image; from the web-server's logs, I see that a fair number of visitors have come to this page, but apparently only a few people (or none) have clicked on the images to see the bigger ones. Sorry for not making that clearer!
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The next really tricky stage was sinking the center; the right-most picture here shows one stage of that: I had two chairs facing each other, and the paper draped over them. It was pretty wild. But I got past that stage ok, and called that good for the day. The next day I tackled the vanes on the back of the beast. In some ways, even though the mass of paper was much more compact ("only" covering half of the dinner table), there was still a lot of paper, and because the sinks were smaller than the main central sink, I did end up tearing the paper at several points. So technically it has not been a completely successful fold; however, I'm not too worried about it, the tears are all along creases which end up hidden inside the back, with just a few short tears at points. No "body" tears as it were, so the final model will still end up looking fine, I think. But I think I am pretty much at the limit of what one person can fold with this paper, it's just too fragile if you don't have several people available to support it from multiple points, and also for one person to hold from one side, and another to push from the other.
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These next pictures show a couple of the later stages of folding the beast; other than the scale, it's pretty much the standard Montroll stegosaur. Because of the scale, though, the stegosaur cannot stand up on its own, so I had to glue cardboard inserts into a bunch of the innards: basically, this dinosaur has a skeleton. I didn't take any pictures of these steps, though.
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The last two pictures show the finished model, which (I think) came out very well. If you look closely, you can see some tears at the tips of the back vanes, but the more-significant tears along creases are all hidden inside. If you look very closely, you can also see a bit of the cardboard insert in the right (far-side) back leg, and also a bit of waviness in the neck from the glue there.
The ruler in front is 48 inches long (120 cm for you folks who live in civilized countries). I have to confess, I was quite tempted to put down an 18-inch ruler and claim it as a 48-inch ruler! :-)
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The baby stegosaur is made out of 30-inch packing paper. If you look closely at it, you'll see that it is in fact an actual baby stegosaur. I modified Montroll's design to make the back vanes and the tail spikes smaller and the body slightly more slender. I don't know if any real baby stegosaur fossils have ever been found, but that seemed to make sense to me...
I should mention that doing origami at this scale is a full-contact sport. One thing I had to watch out for in the early stages was where the sweat would fall if it dripped off my face! Not entirely the usual consideration when doing origami...
If you'd like to comment, please feel free to contact me at korg@korgwal.com.
Enjoy! -- Uwe Hollerbach
Page last modified at 2007/04/22 15:45 US/Eastern time