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Dinosaur Origami Review
I love dinosaurs, so when I discovered there was a book that shows you how to make origami sculptures of these prehistoric beasts, I had to try it out!
The book contains 20 different designs, consisting mostly of well known dinosaurs like Triceratops, Stegosaurus and Tyrannosaurus Rex, but there's also designs for volcanoes, palm trees, and even a questionable appearance by prehistoric man! Presumably this is because they needed to throw a few easier ones into the mix because the dinosaur patterns all look quite difficult. The designs are well presented with step by step guidance, some great photography of the finished models and a little bit of information about the dinosaur including a 3-dino rating of difficulty. At the start of the book there is a short guide on how to get started and at the back is an envelope containing 8 sheets of colored paper to help you get started.
But how hard is it to make these miniature monsters?.. and more importantly, is it fun? To test this out I enlisted two friends, both equally as inexperienced with origami as me to try it out.
Whilst we all wanted to dive in and get started with the T-Rex, it soon became apparent that some of the models required paper that was bigger than the sheets supplied with the book, and many were actually going to be quite difficult, so we decided to set our sights a little lower and have a go at the creating a batch of prehistoric ferns (difficulty 1) using scrap paper in case we made a huge mess of it.
Fern-tastic!
There were a few puzzling moments, but we managed to complete the ferns without too much trouble. Next up? Something more impressing and dinosaur like! The Pteranodon is also rated at difficulty level 1 but was a lot more involved and actually we found some of the steps quite confusing and difficult to work out what was required. It does take a bit of practice to get used to reading the diagrams and working out how the folds work so a little patience is essential.
After putting all that effort into creating one of these models it's amazing to see what you can produce using only a single sheet of paper. I've since created a few more of these including a level two difficulty Ichthyosaurus and although they do get steadily more complicated you do get better at working out the intention of the diagrams with practice and finishing each these mini-masterpieces is incredibly rewarding.
Overall I think this is a really nicely presented little book that would make a great gift for anyone who's into dinosaurs and has a little patience, but I would recommend getting some additional origami paper to include with the book because the bigger models require 50cm sheets. If you're looking to pick up some sheets the sizes used in the book are 15cm, 21cm, 30cm and 50cm.
Dinosaur Origami
$12
20 Prehistoric Origami Projects with Paper Sheets to Get You Started