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Origami Pukeko Chick, One Legged

This is the memed version with one leg. It uses the same layout as the normal 2 legged version, but with ~37% less paper.

Design

People asked if I could make it with just one leg. The answer is obviously yes, but what's less obvious is how to do it efficiently.

I like the latest bird's head and body, so those parts will stay. The body to leg/toes ratio also looks good, so this design should maintain that proportion. 

For the single leg, the efficient solution is to put it in the corner opposite to the head.
The toes can be put along the edges of this opposite corner. However there are unused corners on the sides. Turns out we can use those 3 corners for toes. The 4th and shorter toe that point backwards can be snugged in the bottom corner. It just happened that 3 longer toes have uniform length of 4 units, and the shorter toe is 2 unit long.
Highlighted area is the river for the leg.

Test fold shows that the structure works. I can even use similar maneuver to hide the color leaking seam on the foot as used on the two legged version. However, there are parts between toes with ugly paper accumulation. The other problem is white color leaking out on the toes.
Circled part shows ugly paper accumulation.

The paper accumulation can be prevented by making slit between the toes, which makes the foot forked more deeply. There are many ways to achieve this as shown below. I like the full boxpleated solution as it requires less amount of folds.

The white color leak on the toes can be prevented by swivel folds. We can minimize the amount of seam by making larger swivel folds, at least as big as the toes.
Hiding the color change at the tip.
From left to right: not hidden, hidden with few swivel folds, and hidden with large swivel folds.

Both of these treatment work pretty well.

What's cool about the crease pattern layout is how scalable it is. We can enlarge the space used for legs to create longer toes.


In the end I settled with the initial proportion. Nowadays I am lazy to calculate the reference and just use https://adroitorigami.com/22-5%C2%B0-refs-engine-1 to find it. The full crease pattern is shown on top of this page.

Fold

The final fold uses 17 cm black unryu scraps, leftover from my frigatebirds.

There is a final trick to make the leg sprouting from the middle of the bird instead of the left side or right side. Create a swivel fold as circled below, which creates some loose paper, and the leg can be pulled away from that side to the middle.



I am not sure if this model is teachable. It is simple, but the procedure to precrease and sink the leg is boring.
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