Origami Indonesian Crane

Red and white on both side

This is my participation on a contest by Indonesian Origami Community called "Kompetisi Origami Merah Putih" (Red and White Origami Competition). The color red and white is reference to the flag of Indonesia, as the country will have its independence day celebration on 17th August.

Diagram

Download it here.

Background

The contest's theme was simple origami, with red and white color. How simple is simple? The answer from the judge: "if you teach this to anyone, they'll be able to do it immediately".

From the word "simple origami", the traditional crane came to my mind. I decided to design a crane with little twist: Indonesian's flag in the tail. This will satisfy the constraint: simple, red, and white. Besides, I have always wanted to design a crane variation, just like the popular humanoid crane, santa crane, or rose crane.

Design and Fold

To add a flag, the tail flap just need an extension. This is perfect occasion for border graft. Actually I didn't know how big the graft should be. So I randomly choose a proportion of 1 : 3. We can adjust the size once the design is more mature.

Next, creating the flag. I started folding the bird base, and improvise the tail. Through trial and error, I found a fish-base-like structure can create a color-changed triangular flag. The borders marked with '?' eventually get unused though, it is absorbed into the wing and tail flap. The proportion of 1 : 3 turned out working well.

To further follow the rule of "simple origami", I used common origami paper and did a dry fold. Luckily red and white colored paper is abundant in the realm of common origami paper.

Update 1.1

After learning Orihime, I tried to plot the crease pattern.

Actually the crease pattern above is incorrect, and the proportion needs to be tailored a bit.

Use \(1 + 2\sqrt{2}\) division to get correct graft so there's no exposed white part under the wing.

Update 1.2

I implemented a way to skew the tail that isn't mush. The crease pattern became complicated around the tail.

But the steps are explained in the diagram.