Tridacna gigas (Giant clam) for July 2015 origami challenge (topic: curves and curved shapes)
the model is structurally simple, but quite tricky to get it to the proper shape. I spent three hours playing around with each one of these. I'm only a bit sad the big one doesn't hold properly, the paper turned out to be too heavy and too soft...
because the rules say the model must come from a square, these do too, but they're actually based on dodecagons. I just folded the extra paper away.
I found out different species of these clams have a varying number of grooves on the shells, ranging from 4 to 7, my model has 5. I might explore this further to add some variety to the collection. The easiest one with 4 grooves would use an octagon as its starting polygon, the 6- and 7-grooved ones would use a hexadecagon and icosagon respectively.
Assassin Spider v2 by Baltorigamist, on Flickr
