Angel II (Design by Neal Elias)

Being Advent, I have been folding a lot of Christmas themed decorations and one of these has been Neal Elias’ Angel II. This is a design from the book Neal Elias – Miscellaneous Folds II – which is sold by the British Origami Society.

OrigamiUSA also has a copy of this book (BOS 35 – Neil Elias Miscellaneous Folds II) in its Lending Library. You can find details (FAQs) on borrowing terms and conditions here. The models in this book are complex as they are diagrammed in such a way that a combination of steps are shown in a single picture. This makes it difficult to follow and is meant for folders who are well versed with Neal Elias’ diagramming style.

Paper to use:
In order to fold this angel, I used duo colored Kami paper – white. It came out pretty much alright. I know I could do better with the shaping, but choosing kami made it futile to try a lot. This model will work well with Tissue foil and unryu I suppose.

How to fold this model:
I borrowed a copy of BOS 35 – Neil Elias Miscellaneous Folds II from OrigamiUSA lending Library especially for this particular diagram. To help with understanding the multiple folds in the diagrams, I used Gabriel Vong’s folding instructions which, although is a slight variation on Elias’ model, it helps with folding, nonetheless.

In Neal Elias’ book, the first image has a base already folded – 1/2 bird and 1/2 fish base. If you take a look at Gabriel Vong’s folding instructions, he has diagrammed the steps to get to this base point. In this manner, by cross referencing the steps, I have managed to fold this model. Once you get past forming the hands in Neal Elias’ diagram, the rest of the steps are easy to follow. For shaping the Angel you can refer to already folded models which are available on Flickr, such as Gio Origami’s rendition using mulberry paper.