THE HARPIST

The last member of my music band is another woman, a harpist. For the first time I make a model sitting on a stool. This is the result:

The harpist is a woman with pigtail hair and a design similar to the trombonist but sitting down instead of standing. At the bottom I add two feet coming from below the skirt. This is the CP:

The harpist design comes from a 36x36 grid. The central upper part has three flaps, the hair in the middle and the pigtails on each side. They are edge flaps because I needed them to be thin and symmetric. This is what makes necessary to increase the size of the grid from 32x32 of the trombonist to 36x36 of the harpist. In the following drawing you can see the different parts of the CP highlighted with colours:

In red, the hair. The pigtails in yellow. In blue, the four flaps that make the face. Around the face, in green, a one division wide river. It separates the face from the rest of the head. It adds one division length to the hair and to the neck. In pink a two wide divisions river that crawls around the head to form the neck. In orange, a rectangle that forms the breast. At the bottom, two flaps, three divisions long, that form the feet.

Collapsing this model is easy and similar to the trombonist or the drummer. The challenge is modelling the skirt and placing the model in a natural sitting pose. Here are some pics of the process:

Harpist bottom after applying methyl cellulose and letting it dry

The only advice I can give to model the skirt is to be patient and to use a lot of methyl cellulose. In the last photograph you can see a little trick I used to make rounded curves around the skirt and feet. I made little balls of paper dipped in methyl cellulose and placed them behind the skirt and inside the feet. I also used this trick to model the breast.

Let's go now to the stool . When I though about the harpist I didn't give much importance to the seat. When the time came to fold it I doubted between several models in the origami literature but none of them convinced me. So, I decided to make my own design: Surfing the web I found a very nice stool design:

'Chipboard' stools by Dana Oxiles are an 'attempt to elevate a humble material so that it is read as a chair before being read as sustainable' ; photo by Armando Rafael

It was elegant and easy to copy in origami. It didn't take me long to find a solution:

The hardest part of the model are the circular arches coming from the four corners on top of the stool. You have to be very careful to fold them precisely to obtain a good finish. Let us see some photographs I made with a proof model before folding the final stool.

We start with a square:

We fold the three parallel lines along both diagonals. In the  centre we make a Kawasaki rose twist fold.

We make a template with the form of the circular creases:

We use the template to draw the circular folds on the back of the paper:

We precrease the circular creases and unfold:

We collapse the stool as if it were a rectangular prism. First we crease the top square and then close the four sides. In the following pic you can see one of the sides before closing it:

We close the sides hidding the extra paper at the bottom and then fold the circular creases. In the photograph you can see the clothes-pegs I used to hold the model until it got dry as I was wet folding the model:

The final stool:

By changing the size of the top square you can make it taller or shorter. In my final model I chose a tall one:

Bottom view of the model, in the centre you can see the Kawasaky rose twist

The third part of this model was the instrument, the harp. I must confess that until I finished the model I didn't trust to have a nice result. That is one of the reasons for folding this musician the last. For me, a harp must have strings. The problem is that a harp with very thin strings from one sheet of paper is, I think, impossible to achieve. I opted by a modular approach. For the harp frame I would use the CP brilliantly deduced by Ricardo Montecinos from Eric Joisel's original model and for the strings, very thing strips of paper.

Here is the harp CP:

Let us see some steps of the collapsing process on a proof model:

And here the final model I folded from a 50x4.17 cm kozo paper painted with brown water colour. You can also notice the thin strips of paper that will form the strings:

Finally, as a tribute to traditional origami I have added one 'pajarita'. In my last musician I added one crane as a tribute to the Oriental origami. Now in this musician I add a 'pajarita' as a tribute to the Western origami:

With the four models folded, musician, stool, harp and pajarita, we proceed with the final assembly. You can see the end result here:

And finally, with my eleven musicians completed I can proceed with the last part of my project: putting them together for the family photo.

THE TROMBONIST

After folding 8 dwarves the time had come to break the male monopoly. It was time to fold a woman, When I began this project one year ago I had a lot of doubts about the models I would finally fold. In the beginning it was easy because I only had to fold the models created and brilliantly designed by other people. With half the band folded I begun to realise I wanted to add some new elements to my band. That is how, first the flautist, and later the drummer, were born. But even so, I knew my expectations would not be completed if I didn't add a female to the band.

Today, I am very happy to present my new model a TROMBONIST, a FEMALE TROMBONIST:

The design process of this model started some months ago. During these months I created a mental image of the model I wanted to design. I identified some key elements that had to be present to give the personality I wanted for her: long hair, smooth face, big breast, thin waist and a long skirt. I had already tried all these elements in former models:

The long hair would be a mix between the crumpled violinist hair and the long hair of the drummer:

The face would be the violinist face trying to make it as smooth as possible:

The big breast and thin waist would follow the stile of my Spanish Dancer:

The long skirt would be similar to Hojyo Takashi's violinist, 

or Tadashi Mori's bride:

Once I knew what I wanted to create I began with the technical part of the design. The first thing was to draw the tree diagram:

I soon realised the tree was very similar to the drummer's tree. In the drummer the breast flap is longer and folds flat on top of the body. I began to work with my drummer's CP and after some adjustments to lengthen the hair flap and shorten the breast flap I came out with my trombonist CP: 

It is important to notice the bottom of the CP. The lines running down slowly fade away before the paper ends. They are the skirt. If we wanted to collapse the base and make it lie flat on a table we would need to fold them fully down. It isn't our case. We want to make a 3D skirt with as few creases on the paper as possible.

We can compare both CPs, trombonist and drummer, painting similar areas in the model with the same colours. Both of them are 32x32 grids:

The hair is pink. It measures three units in both models but in the trombonist there is a 'green' river that adds two additional units. So we have five units for the trombonist vs three for the drummer. In yellow we have the face. Four flaps the trombonist vs three for the drummer. The fourth extra flap let me fold the mouth. With the drummer I didn't fold the mouth because I could add a moustache. The neck is blue. It's longer in the drummer (3 units vs 1). The breast is red. In the drummer it is 3 units, the same length as the body so that is can fold on top of it. The arms are grey. They are 10 units long in both models. The fingers are similar.

For the final model I have used kozo paper, a 45x45 cm square. The final height of the model is 20,5 cm. Let us see the folding process:

Back view

Front view

Notice how I fold the skirt, trying not to make extra creases, specially at the bottom. My advise is to let the paper fold itself as you advance on the closing of the model.

Collapsed model

We can put a paper ball inside the breast to help with the modelling of this part:

The skirt bottom can be folded inward to adjust the model height. At the same time this fold helps to close the model:

Then, we model the face:

And finally, we reach the detailed modelling. It is surprisingly easy compared to other dwarves. It also closes on itself very nicely without need of much wet folding with methyl cellulose. It is probably the music that has taken me less time to model.

This model, once folded, is like a noble woman in court, a MILADY, and so that is how I have named her before adding any music instrument so than she becomes the ninth member of my music band:

The woman took me long working hours but folding the instrument was very straightforward. The trombone CP was deduced and released in his flickr by Ricardo Montecinos:

The collapsing process is very simple. Here you have a photo of a preliminary model just after completing the collapse:

And here is the final model, I used a rectangular kozo paper, 36x6 cm. The final length of the model is 9 cm. I painted it with deep gold acrylic:

And as an ending of this post here you have the model from different perspectives: