THE FLAUTIST

This post could well have been titled 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin' because the end result of my next musician reminds me of that personage. The idea came to my mind step by step as I folded the complete model. First the musician, then the instrument, a transverse flute silver coloured with little contrast and finally the rat to give it more colour and to emulate the Hamelin tale. Let us see the whole story:

After the first three musicians I wanted to fold something different. For a long time I had been thinking about folding one of the Joisel's long and thin musicians. It was going to be different to the other dwarves but if I folded it with the right proportions I thought I could mix them. The photograph that inspired me can be found in Joisel's web page:

The models are taller and thinner than the dwarves in the Jazz Band but they have the same structure. There is one thing that caught my attention. It is the neck that some of the models show. I have not found a solution to this problem yet. Until now, none of the musicians I have folded has a proper neck.

After long hours of investigation, documentation, folding and modelling I came up with my fourth musician: THE FLAUTIST. He is accompanied by a rat, of course a Joisel's rat, that stands hypnotised by the music as if in the tale 'The Pied Piper of Hamelin'.

As always, the first step is getting a good design. I was lucky and I found a CP by Edwin Claudio from the Sociedad Boliviana de Origami (Origami Bolivian Society). The origami coming from Bolivia is astonishing. 

The CP has the same structure as the 'tradicional' Joisel's dwarf but coming from a rectangle instead of a square. The grid is 40x32. The result is a very harmonious and stylised model with very long and thin legs. In my case I used a Kozo rectangle of 40x32 cm, 1cm per division. The end height of the model is 23,5 cm. As in the dwarves the arms come out from behind the head. There is a little trick that helps to lengthen the arms and makes them begin from a lower position. We'll see it later.

After seeing this CP you can think about some obvious variations. You can modify it to fold the Jobit with diamonds, skirt or the Jobit dressed on a tailcoat. I may try them in future musicians.

Let us see the collapsing process:

Precreased CP. The folds at the lower part of the body are very slightly creased. It is better to make them later once the model is almost totally collapsed. Depending on how you close the body, they can be in a slightly different position 

I start the collapsing process with the legs

Then I close the upper part

And I end closing the lower part of the coat/body You can see how the arms come out from behind the head.

The final base, front view

Back view

Depending on how we have collapsed the bottom of the coat we can have more or less excess paper. We hide it inside the body using a squash fold trying to make the legs as long as possible.  

The lower part of the body before hiding it with a squash fold 

Once hidden, the legs are much longer

From this stage the folding process is very similar to the 'tradicional' dwarf's one.

We fold the legs to hide them behind the body

The legs coming out from inside the body.

Back view. Now we only have to close the model using the extra paper in the two sides of the back and hiding one of them inside the pocket formed by the other one as in the 'tradicional' dwarf. 

Back view once the model is closed

Front view 

Finally, in order to get a more natural pose for the arms we pull them down while pushing back the hat. The drawback of this process is that we can not make the hat go straight up from the head as before. In my case it wasn't a problem because I wanted to make a cap. A long, pointed hat would have made the contrast with the other dwarves bigger than I pretended.

Lowering the hat while pulling down the arms

After this step, the modelling process starts. You have to be careful reinforcing the legs (in my case with methylcellulose and carpenter glue). They are thin and may not hold the model if not properly treated.

We come up with the end model that I show from different sides:

The instrument, a transverse flute, is folded from a 74x12 rectangle. The CP was deduced and released by Ricardo Montecinos in his web page.

Now you can see some pics on how to collapse the keys (a total of nine) and the mouthpiece. 

The draft I made to calculate the position of each line of the CP

Collapsing one key

A view of  two keys nearly collapsed

Collapsing the mouthpiece

The collapsed mouthpiece

Final collapsed model, the mouthpiece on the left and two keys on the right

Back view

This simple test fold let me learn how the CP worked and I could start the definitive flute. It is folded from a 23.9 x 3.9 cm kozo paper rectangle painted with silver acrylic. Once you fold the keys and mouthpiece you only have to form a cylinder with the remaining paper and close both ends with some paper. This is the end result:

And finally, some words about one of the best origami designs ever, at least in my humble opinion, Joisel's rat. It was designed by Eric Joisel in 1996 and has been published in many books and magazines, for example in the great book 'Eric Joisel - The Magician of Origami'.

Here is a close up pic of the rat:

THE SAXOPHONE

When I saw Eric Joisel's Great Jazz Band in the Joisel's exhibition in Zaragoza back in 2013, one of the instruments that caught my attention was the saxophone.

Eric Joise's saxophonist in the Zaragoza Exhibition in 2013.

Since the moment I decided to create my own Jazz Band I knew the saxophonist would be one of the first musicians I would fold. In Joisel's web site there are a couple of photos showing a CP and the folded instrument:

Saxophone CP in the upper part

Two different saxophones folded by Joisel

The idea behind this design is simple and relatively similar to the clarinet I had already folded a few months ago. It is a rectangular paper divided in 9 stripes all along. It forms the keys with a square tessellation. Joisel also reduces the diameter of the tube from the bell to the mouth.

I was thinking about trying to replicate this model but in the end I preferred the idea of making the keys similar to the clarinet's keys. This is the end result:

My own design for the saxophone folded from kozo paper and painted with acrylic deep gold

In the CP you can see the nine stripes that will form the four sides of the square tube and the keys of the instrument. The ninth stripe is just for closing the model. Only the first row of keys is detailed in the CP. There are 20 keys in total, 18 in six rows with 3 keys each (three fingers per hand) and 2 to form the left hand rest and the right thumb hook. Comparing the clarinet CP with this one you can see it is very similar but adding more keys and bending folds at the bottom to make the bell.

The clarinet CP that inspired me to create the saxophone

When I designed my final saxophone I had to decide how many keys to fold. When you look at a real saxophone it looks really complex, with the body surrounded by keys, levers and hooks. I chose to fold three to accommodate three fingers per hand but I guess any other number would be as good as this one. It would be as simple as adding more key lines to the CP. In this photograph you can see a real person playing the saxophone and how the fingers are placed.:

Saxophonist example pressing three keys with each hand. Original image here

There are a lot of different mechanisms around the tube making the number of keys to fold a difficult choice.
Original image here

Let us see some photos of the folding process:

The paper with the nine stripes  and the upper row of keys precreased

After folding the 9 stripes

We start to fold the keys, you can see one on top (the front key) and one in the middle of the photo (one side key)

We proceed with the folding

We close the paper

And squeeze the paper to put the keys together

Repeating on the other side we get three keys

This is the back side of the paper. It doesn't stand flat

We repeat with the rest of the keys including the two back keys

Finally we squeeze each key to give it the final form

Although in the following photos not all the keys are finished it is better to do it now when the saxophone is still relatively flat. Latter it becomes harder to manipulate. This was my first attempt after designing the model and I didn't realised it

The back side with all the upper keys folded

We star to bend the tube 

This is the first bending of the tube

We repeat three times

We make another bending fold

And one last bending fold to separate the bell from the tube slightly 

This is the final shape of the tube

We start with the bell. 

We fold this little triangle

We push it inside

After repeating with all the flaps

The same area from the back side

We separate the layers to make the end of the paper  the wider we can  

And finally shape the bell

The last step is folding the mouth piece

A little moisture and modelling takes us to the final result

Finally I don't want to lose the opportunity to thank Victor J. Quintero for his help to deduce Joisel's saxophone CP. After seeing my saxophone's photo in my flickr he deduced and sent me this CP.

Simplified CP deduced by Victor J. Quintero

Victor J. Quintero's folded saxophone. We would get a saxophone very similar to Joisel's one by adding more diamonds to the CP