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Bonsai tree

Designed and folded March 2020

Paper: 40cm tissue foil (sandwich paper)

You don't realize how cool trees are until you try to make one. Every branch has a seemingly random length and angle, yet overall when you look at a tree in nature, it seems pretty even and still looks natural. When trying to depict this in origami, it took a number of tries to mess around with the length and angles of the branches, and how many leaves per branch, and so on to make it look somewhat natural enough.

The main principle at work here: if you want something to be color changed, put it on the edge of the paper. Thus, to color change all the leaves, they all need to be on the edge, leaving the center of the square for the trunk (which works well, because you want the trunk to be a much thicker flap). Each leaf is a 2 unit flap. I later found a much better way to make leaves, but for this model it works ok.