Power Word Fold

Tentacles. Lots of them. That’s what defines this little guy. I’d done up a Cthulhu design earlier, but the small number of tentacles and rather spindly arms and legs made the overall thing look rather miserable.



And a tail? What was I thinking?

So back to the drawing board. There’ll need to be lots of tentacles obviously, and maybe we’ll get something done about those limbs.

Possibly the most famous image of Cthulhu is that of the painting done by Raymond Bayless. It’s serviceable, but doesn’t quite convey the might and majesty of the real thing. A better rendition is the one by William Stout – bat wings, claws, the whole works.

A tree figure for Cthulhu would thus look like this:



Shouldn’t be too hard to translate that into a packing pattern. Still, I soon realised that stuffing too many equally long tentacles would take up a lot of room on a square, which meant both (a) lots of precreasing, and (b) a huge scale reduction. So, a compromise was made – some long tentacles, and a row of short ones: quantity over quality. With that, it was easy enough to settle on the head design:


For convenience, the whole row of tentacles was drawn to be 40 units wide. That defines the starting square, ie a 40×40 grid. Legs come next, and these fall naturally on the other side of the square as the tentacles. Topping the legs is a river 2 units wide; separating the upper half of the body from the lower half. Since there’s room, a 4-unit long flap can be thrown into the centre for the torso. The arms are then placed on either side:


A river can be inserted for a neck, but that would mean cramming some more stuff, and besides, Cthulhu doesn’t even seem to have a neck anyway. The remainder of the square will be used for the wings. To deal with the region between the arms and torso flap, there’s two options – either shift the arm subunits towards the torso flap, or put in two fillers. The latter is preferable, since they can later be pulled out to form a bloated belly. The wings are further subdivided into a river surrounding a few smaller flaps; like the filler rectangles, these can be pulled out for more detail later. So with that, here’s the last of the packing, together with a partial crease pattern with the diagonals filled in:


The partial crease pattern can be filled in according to the usual box-pleating rules, but the resulting CP will be about as useful as a scissors for a purist.

Anyway, so that’s the easy part. Now, folding this and putting in the details is going to take a while longer…stay tuned!