Power Word Fold

There’s many tips and tricks in other forms of art that can be applied in origami as well. One of these involves the proportions of human figures, and how to draw them.

Translating this into a tree figure and using the ‘head’ as the basic unit of measurement, we’ll end up with the following:


Tree figure for a rudimentary human, measured in heads

It’s not exactly the proportions that are traditionally used in human figure drawing. There are some slight differences:
1. The arms are slightly longer.
2. The torso is slightly shorter.
3. The legs are slightly longer.
The reasons for these will be made clear below.

In any case, let’s set one head to be 2 units on our square grid (the reason for this 2-unit selection has to do with parity in box pleating – more on this in a later post, possibly). Packing the above tree into a square will give a crease pattern that uses a 20×20 grid:


Square packing for a human figure

There’s quite a bit of unused space in this packing. Some of these can be filled up by pulling the leg and arm squares back from the edges, while the remaining bit in the centre can be packed with filler molecules. This would give the following partial and full crease patterns:



Partial and full CPs

Folding this crease pattern yields a base like this (viewed from the top):


View of base from the top

However, for a human, we’re aiming for a plan view. Hence, we’ll need to open up this figure along the axis, and bend out the flaps a little. The photo below shows the result:



Folding the arm flaps out at an angle would mean that some of the paper allocated to this flap would be taken up by the folded region (upper red circle), leaving an arm which is only 5 units long. Similarly, the squash fold that takes place in the pelvis region (lower red circle) also sucks up a unit from each leg. Visually, this squash fold adds to the height of the torso region, making it look taller. Hence the need to make the proportions slightly different when drawing the tree figure – origami is one of those strange things where the amount of material you have is conserved, unlike in drawing. Things like shoulder and knee joints need to be factored in to the initial tree figure; drawing a tree whose proportions are exactly the same as that of the subject you’re trying to design usually produces a model that looks almost, but not quite, right.

Once the base is folded, all that’s left to do is to turn it into something more presentable:


A possible end result for the crease pattern shown above

This design for a human figure is still pretty minimal. Still, it’s a starting point for a more detailed figure, for example, one with a full complement of fingers and toes. This requires only a bunch of grafts along the edges of the square – something that’s quite easily added!