The Origami Dog Blog

Gathering and Taking Flight

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 20:04:01 GMT

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Cranes are a traditional wedding icon in Japanese culture. Cranes or tsuru symbolize longevity and marital harmony. Multiplied by 1001 (because odd numbers are always preferred over even ones), that would appear to be a successful relationship.

Most often, the cranes are folded, then strung, then displayed at the wedding. In this case, I wanted a more powerful image. I decided that birds in flight were a much more engaging image than bird's just hanging in mid-air. So each crane was positioned with tail and neck outstretched. In the first panel, they come together in a gathering. In the second and third panels, they've got places to go and soar!

Since the ceremony and reception were going to be outdoors, I chose all water-resistant materials. My patrons recruited their friends and family to fold the cranes, making the piece even more memorable.

Here's some environmental testing. We don't want anything to go wrong during the event!

And here are the happy couple. A thousand and one years, times one thousand and one, of love and harmony to you both.

The Source of All Chocolate

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 18:58:29 GMT

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This was a design challenge to create the shape and texture of a cacao pod. As it happened, that was considerably less tedious than folding the individual cocoa beans!

Not just your average money lei

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 19:41:35 GMT

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When you promote yourself as an Origami Designer, you really do feel compelled to make something better than what's already been done. So when a patron asks you to make a money lei, you start with an Internet search to see what's out there. Then you think on how you can outdo it.

In this case, I decided that a cool money lei had to start with cool money flowers. So I played with some flower designs. I decided this one seemed attractive with it's slightly curved and rounded petals. It's also sturdy enough to hold it's shape. .

If this were a plumeria being made into a lei, we'd just string them up right through the middle. So that's what I did.

Sometimes things look better in my head than when I actually make them, so I needed to make a sample. I was visiting family at the time, so emptying everyone's wallet of $1 bills, I was able to make four flowers to string together. Enough to send this picture to my patron.

Then I did the math. 3 bills per flower. 3 flowers per inch. Average lei is 40 inches long. That would be 360 bills!

I am so grateful to have patrons willing to support my art projects. Bills were delivered and I got to finish the money lei.

If I were making this lei on a smaller budget, I would use (strong) colored paper rather than bills for some of the petals or flowers. The time commitment to make this lei will still make it a significant gift.

Flexible Shaping for Friendship Koi

sfnakaya@kindredspiritkindredcare.com (Shannon Nakaya) — Sat, 02 Nov 2024 02:43:56 GMT

Seriously, friendship koi should be able to travel anywhere! So I made a few subtle design modifications and voila, packed and ready to go! Once unpacked, they are easily shaped in about 15 seconds! These are the types of achievements that make a designer swoon.

Here's how a friendship koi will now pack and travel:

Upon arrival, you just open it up and do a teeny bit of shaping starting with the mouth.

And the back of the head. There will be a slight gap between the smooth back of the head and the scaled part of its body. This is part of the design and makes shaping a little easier. If the wire is too stiff to shape with your fingers, you can use a chopstick or a spoon to help make a smooth curve.

Next, fold the pectoral fins away from the body.

And shape the whiskers

Last, open up the tail.

If you want to get fancy and add some curve to your koi fish, there are hidden wires along the edges of its body to hold that shape as well.

Like this

One more thing! Friendship Koi can be displayed on a horizontal surface like a bookcase or coffee table, OR there are three loops on the underside so they can be hung on a wall swimming in almost any direction.

I am so humbled that my origami fish have found their way from Hawaii all over the world! I hope you like your Friendship Koi.

Representing the Physical and Spiritual Through Origami Art

sfnakaya@kindredspiritkindredcare.com (Shannon Nakaya) — Thu, 03 Oct 2024 01:45:16 GMT

Small domesticated pigs, or pua'a, were first brought to the Hawaiian island by Polynesians around 160 years ago. Some of these escaped their confinement and took up life in the forest. Over time, other (larger) varieties of pig were brought to Hawaii and a lot of cross breeding occurred. This resulted in the uniquely Hawaiian feral pig or pua'a we see today.

Most of modern feral pigs have some genetic linkage to the first pua'a and retain the Hawaiian name. They also retain value as a food source, and a symbol for intelligence, cunning, mischief, strength, and stubbornness. There is even a Hawaiian demigod named Kamapua'a, who could take the form of both a boar and a human.

In ancient Hawaiian culture, there was less divide between humans, animals, gods, and nature.

Humans would have family guardian gods or aumakua. Each aumakua was connected to some animal or other natural phenomenon. Mano (shark), pua'a (pig), pueo (owl), makani (wind), and nalu (wave), are just a few examples of how aumakua could manifest. There were stronger connections between the physical world and the spiritual world.

It is that connection between physical and spiritual that I aimed to honor and express in this piece. My pua'a is not a domesticated pig, but a strong and powerful beast. The black represents the physical as many of the feral pua'a are black. The white with the misty veil represents the spiritual, equally strong and powerful.

Here is an 'alala version of the concept.

Manta Unfurled

sfnakaya@kindredspiritkindredcare.com (Shannon Nakaya) — Wed, 10 Apr 2024 07:53:42 GMT

Seven years after designing manta, I suddenly realized that it can actually travel in a two dimensional flattened form and then be opened up and shaped for 3 dimensional display in about 15 seconds. Duh! This just proves how seeing something day after day can make us "blind" to its features. Sometimes it is best to put something aside for a while and then view it with fresh eyes.

This is what "flat manta" looks like leaving my sudio:

All nice and flat for shipping or packing in a suitcase. Once removed from the package, you can unfurl its body. This is a top view. You can also add a gentle curve to each of its wings. There are hidden wires to hold this shaping. This image is a view from the top.

There are also hidden wires in manta's lower jaw and each cephalic fin. So you can gently shape these with your fingertips or tweezers or a needle nose pliers. It's kind of like those old fashioned gumby toys.

Origami Reversion

sfnakaya@kindredspiritkindredcare.com (Shannon Nakaya) — Mon, 27 Feb 2023 02:14:41 GMT

Mirriam-Webster defines reversion as "an act or instance of turning the opposite way." So while origami is often about folding paper to represent an object, Origami Reversion would be about reconstructing the object from the origami. It's kind of like how archeologists create dinosaur models from old bones.

I'm making this up, by the way. But it's what I've been exploring in my studio these past months, and having too much fun with it not to share. I started with an origami giraffe folded from a 9 foot x 9 foot square. I forgot to photograph it, but it looked pretty much like this floppy giraffe. At 5-1/2 feet tall, it would never stand on its own.

I added some masking tape to hold it together, some metal tubes to help it stand, and some stuffing to flesh it out. After that, I needed to make it sturdier, so I layered on an exoskeleton using fiberglass casting tape, essentially creating a reasonably sturdy armature or framework for a sculpture.

Then I added cement. Actually, I did this several times as I learned about different types of mortar and concrete. Each has a different texture, hardness, and curing time. I also needed to figure out how thick the cement "frosting" needed to be so that it wouldn't crack like an egg shell with the smallest movement (learned that the hard way) and didn't look too clunky like a mud figurine (learned that the hard way too) or weigh so much that the finished piece would forever stay right where it was made. There was a time when I really wasn't sure Giraffe would make it out of my studio. The project took enough perseverance to complete that my canine partner lost interest, but loyalty kept her with me at my studio providing moral support in slumber.

I needed to add a base in order to create more balance for the piece. In the final stage, I added some color and voila! Something resembling a giraffe based on an origami!

Did I learn anything about origami design from this exercise? Yes! Using origami as an armature for sculpture is a way of seeing the proportion and balance of the origami design.

Separate from that, it was just fun!! And another way of creating large-scale origami-based sculptures.

One year later: Here are a few more cement sculptures I've made using origami as my armature.

Box Pleating

sfnakaya@kindredspiritkindredcare.com (Shannon Nakaya) — Sat, 07 Jan 2023 20:25:05 GMT

Box pleating is a different approach to designing origami. Box pleating starts with a grid. When you accordion fold a grid, it collapses. This works in two directions, x and y, if you're mathematically inclined. By strategically collapsing some parts and not others, you can create shape.

My menehune design is box pleated. So are koinobori, and dragons. One advantage of box pleating is the ability to work on a piece in sections. With menehune, for example, I start at the feet and legs, work my way up to the body, then the arms, then the neck and head, and last the hairdo. This is very helpful when folding supersized origami because it's not easy to find a space to lay out a 25 foot long rectangle. It is also a lot of time spent crawling around on the floor.

The downside is that box pleated designs often require a lot material. A 9 inch tall menehune, for example, is collapsed from a rectangle that is 5 feet long (x 1 foot wide). To supersize a menehune that stands 4 feet tall requires a starting sheet that is 25 feet long (x 5 feet wide); more for long hair.

Origami Bases

sfnakaya@kindredspiritkindredcare.com (Shannon Nakaya) — Wed, 02 Nov 2022 20:27:47 GMT

Most origami starts with a base. It could be a very simple base, like the classic bird base from which cranes are folded. Or it could be a very complicated base, like the one that Hoang Tien Quyet created for his horse and is published in the book, 50 Hours of Origami by the Vietnam Origami Group.

There is a thorough explanation of origami bases in Robert Lang's treatise on origami design, Origami Design Secrets .

So the first part of origami design is figuring out which base is most suitable for what you want to fold. Again, Lang provides many tips for choosing a base depending on the number of arms, legs, wings, etc that you might want for your model. It is also really educational, in my opinion, to learn from other designers, especially in the beginning. Acquire as many origami books and publications as you can and Keep Folding. Identify the base the designer is starting with and think about how each fold transforms that base into the finished model.

BEING AN ORIGAMI DESIGNER

sfnakaya@kindredspiritkindredcare.com (Shannon Nakaya) — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 23:05:44 GMT

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One of the more common questions I am asked is, "How do you even do that?"

I never really planned to become an origami designer/artist. It kind of just happened . . . gradually . . . over several years. My first origami design was an origami corgi dog in 2017. I could mentally see what I wanted, but could not find instructions for it, so I just started fiddling until I figured it out. Through that experience, I learned that it is a completely different use of our brain to DESIGN origami than to follow origami diagrams.

There is no fixed protocol for becoming an origami designer/artist. But there are a few observations and suggestions that I can share based on my own art journey.

Number 1: Fold, Fold, Fold . Between folds, think about what is happening. What is the purpose of that fold or that series of folds you just did? Designing origami uses a completely different part of the brain from following instructions. That being said, you can still learn a lot from what other designers have done. Just don't get so focused on following that you forget to think about the process, and analyze the design as you fold.

Number 2: Try different approaches. Different brains process differently. Robert Lang's, Origami Design Secrets is comprehensive, well-written, excellently diagrammed, and even has tutorials. Understanding the math and geometry behind origami is helpful for understanding how origami works. Some people can then design using just these mathematical concepts and formulas. They can design on computers because they have the innate ability to visualize the transformation from a two dimensional piece of paper to a three dimensional object. I occasionally plot things on grid paper, particularly with box pleating, but more often, I design with my fingertips, and LOTS of trial and error.

Number 3: If you want to be able to reproduce it, record what you're doing as you do it. Admittedly, it can be tedious and disruptive to take notes and photos as you "experiment," especially when it doesn't work out. I have had to reverse engineer my own work to figure out what I did.

Number 4: All traditional origami has a base. Different bases have different numbers of "extremities" and different proportions. A reasonable starting point is to figure out which base best suits your intended model.

Number 5: Box pleating is flexible and fun.

Lesson 6: Sometimes it helps to focus on one section at a time. I've got file folders on feet/claws, wings, faces, scales, etc. Each file folder represents a cumulative study of a particular body part and different ways of folding it off a straight edge, or a corner, or the middle of a paper. The familiarity with different ways of folding and sculpting a particular body part allows me to more efficiently "insert" it into a design.

Lesson 7: Materials matter.

Lesson 8: Like many things, expertise is earned by building, little by little, on what you know. Keep Folding!

SUPER-SIZING ORIGAMI

sfnakaya@kindredspiritkindredcare.com (Shannon Nakaya) — Sun, 10 Jul 2022 12:27:31 GMT

Super-sizing origami creatures is part art and part engineering and always an adventure.

First, if you want to double the size of a piece, it will take four times the amount of material. Think about it: 2 foot length x 2 foot width = 4 square feet. 4 foot length x 4 foot width = 16 square feet. And 8 foot length x 8 foot width = 64 square feet. If you're gluing smaller pieces together, that's a lot of joining. In my case, where I dye my own materials, that's a lot more dye.

Bigger squares translate to needing a bigger workspace. Then there's cleaning and preparing the floor of that workspace. And then there's a lot of time spend crawling around on that floor. I've thought about building a bigger table but when your table gets so big that you can't reach the middle of it, you'll end up crawling around on the table. Getting disoriented is remarkably easy compared to "normal" folding. Turning an 8 foot (or larger) square over without disrupting existing folds or creating wrinkles is not. Even folding a simple piece can be a work out when super-sized.

Once folded, super-sized origami will not stand on its own. It needs structural support. It's kind of like a skin that needs a skeleton and maybe even a few muscles to fill it. The bigger and taller the piece, the more structural support required. I shape metal rods and plates, and then slide them in-between folds, gluing them in place and out of sight. Every piece needs to be balanced so it doesn't tilt or lean to one side or fall over.

Once structural stability is achieved, there is still more detailed sculpting to be done, at least for me. More hidden wires, softer this time, strategically inserted between folds to hold shape and details. Sometimes I use foam or other fillers.

Priscilla the Pink Pony (pictured above) is folded from a 8 foot x 8 foot square, and stands about 30 inches tall. I love the contrast between the sturdiness and solidness of her musculature and the soft and flowing nature of her mane and tail. There are metal bars in all four legs and along her back. There is also more than 25 feet of wire holding the shape of her face, mane, and tail.

I've supersized giraffe, ox, several dragons, canaries, 'alala, shark, dogs, turtles, mo'o , and trolls. Bigger. Grander. More!

WELCOME TO MY WORLD OF EXTREME ORIGAMI ART

sfnakaya@kindredspiritkindredcare.com (Shannon Nakaya) — Wed, 25 May 2022 02:07:58 GMT

An accomplished interior designer once shared a tip with me that went something like, "Every space needs a touch of whimsy." If a little is good than a lot is better? I may have embraced her suggestion a little too heartily, but it makes me feel joyful being surrounded by happy, playful, fantastical creatures. It reminds me to put my worries aside and simply enjoy the moment.

I also embrace the idea of installing art in everyday places as embellishments to something that would otherwise be utilitarian and boring, like giant flowers painted on my garage door (thank you Kathleen Jaeger), origami turtles on my electric box, and a gargoyle on the top of my desk lamp.

Art consultants have suggested that I have my art staged and photographed in luxury living spaces to help people visualize how it might be displayed. If my art can grace a luxury living space and make it's occupants smile, that's great. But owning, or just feeling, a bit of happy should not be about socioeconomic status.

For me, there is satisfaction in sharing happy with people from all walks of life. So to that idea, here are some amateur snapshots of my art in my world. If it makes you smile, or inspires , your own creativity, then you understand why I do what I do.

WHAT IS FINE ART?

sfnakaya@kindredspiritkindredcare.com (Shannon Nakaya) — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 07:18:18 GMT

It depends on who you ask and there are absolutely grey zones. But for the sake of discussion, Oxford English Dictionary defines fine art as “creative art, especially visual art, whose products are to be appreciated primarily or solely for their imaginative, aesthetic, or intellectual content.”

To put it crudely, it is a work of art that serves no useful function whatsoever. Utilitarian it is not! As a consumer, fine art is totally a luxury item. As an artist, the definition of fine art includes some very captivating words: creative, imaginative, aesthetic, intellectual. The implication is that fine art is a visual creation that mentally engages its audience giving rise to thoughts and opinions and perhaps rousing emotions. Fine art is a brain game!

Historically, fine art encompassed painting, sculpture, architecture, music, and poetry. In modern times, music and poetry have become their own art forms, and fine art has become mostly about visual art and includes an almost unlimited range of media including photography, printmaking, drawings, watercolor, and sculpture using all manner of materials. So long as it serves no purpose other than to visually engage a mind, it can be made from pretty much anything and potentially qualify as fine art.

This bodes well for my mission to convince people that origami can be a medium for fine art. (Wink, wink.) My origami designs and sculptures have been described as “cool,” “amazing,” “interesting,” “experimental”, “cognitive,” “multi-layered”, and “mind-bogglingly complicated.” Through strategic folding and sculpting, I aim to infuse each creation with enough personality and character to tell a story. I would venture to speculate that qualifies it as fine art.

BRINGING ORIGAMI INTO THE ART WORLD

sfnakaya@kindredspiritkindredcare.com (Shannon Nakaya) — Sun, 17 Apr 2022 06:33:58 GMT

My journey with origami as a medium for fine art has been incubating for about a decade. In fact, it didn't even mature into an actual goal till just a few years ago. I was just fascinated by process of folding a two dimensional piece of paper into a three dimensional figure with all these details worked into the scheme. It was a glorious puzzle. Then I thought about what made some art and artists more successful than other artists. With no formal art education, I came up with "Bigger. Grander. More." Consider Dale Chihuly, for example. There are a lot of glassblowers out there, but Chihuly creates glass installations that are Bigger. Grander. And More. So I got it in my head to apply "Bigger. Grander. More" to origami and see where it led.

Little discoveries in my day-to-day engagement with origami projects collectively became a larger body of knowledge about origami, origami design, different types of paper and paper-like materials, dyes, paints, glues, lacquers, good and bad chemistry between these materials, sculpture, structural engineering, art and artists, the business of art, and so much more. All this happened gradually enough that I failed to see how much I'd actually learned and evolved. I have been and continue to work on my art degree at the School of Life.

I knew I was dabbling in relatively uncharted territory with origami as a medium for fine art. But it wasn't until I started talking to gallery owners, art dealers and art consultants that I realized how different. Moreover, most people see my origami designs as mind-blowingly complicated. Bottom line: Like Lucy, "(I) got some splainin to do."

And so rises The Origami Dog Blog. (Got a ring to it, no?) More about origami art, materials, dyes, design, sculpting, the business of art, and my mission to show that origami can be a medium for fine art.