Origami Tortoise

Or mud turtle. Pick your poison.

Made an origami tortoise today. I wanted to take step by step photos of it but felt like that would come too close to plagiarism. Instead I'll just add a link to the site I followed to make the thing.

Photos

Top down view of the tortoise

top down view of tortoise

A more 3/4 view from behind

view of tortoise from behind and above

Underside of the tortoise

underside of the tortoise

Thoughts

The site marks this model at medium difficulty. The head in particular is extremely fiddly to get right. There are about 3 steps in this where to make it you have to make a guesstimate as to how much to fold.

If you decide to make this model, the tail will possibly be the most confusing piece. I found that making the bump happen in line with the corners of the diamond was the sweet spot. All the site says is "don't fold past the halfway spot" which is a little hard. By the time you are at that stage of the build, the halfway point is higher than the edge of the diamond.

This is a little hard to visualize since things will be 6 sided at the point so here's what I mean

This would be the body of the tortoise minus the head and the legs. It's oriented the correct way up.

diagram of tortoise body

The red dot represents the halfway mark. The purple dot represents the ideal spot to make the "bump" on the shell. Anything further than that looks off and makes the model really hard to work with since you are sending the pointy edges in an unnatural direction.

Overall, it's a nice model to build and looks... Friendly :D. 8/10 from me.

Link to instructions

Posted on June 24 2018 by Adnan Issadeen