Box Head, designed by Boice
This iconic model is one that we folded at the East Bay Origami Convention back in March. It takes inspiration from Boice’s Head Empty model, which is a person in a coat and tie, with a cube for a head. Taking that same idea to the extreme, now we have a little doll with a giant cube for a head. It’s pretty hard to get a photo of the thing, because from any view from above, the giant head eclipses the rest of the body. If you could see it from above, you would see that the cube is open on the top and in the back.
Boice has a video tutorial. It’s easier than it looks, but you may want to start with large paper. I think it’s a good introduction to the box pleating method.
The tricky part was getting it to stand up. I chose the fold the feet a bit differently from the instructions, giving it giant duck feet.
Reminds me of a classic ‘It’s magic’ origami design from back in the 1970s, which started with a single 2×1 sheet of paper and ended up with a rabbit sitting on top of a cubical die. No spots on the die, and the die was essentially just the classic ‘waterbomb’, but getting the two figures out of the same sheet was fun. (Looked it up, apparently originally by Fred Rohm, popularized by stage magician Robert Harbin. There’s actually a whole series of things like ‘seal with a cube’ to go with it.)
It’s not really surprising that historically a number of the people who really pushed origami as an art form into the West were stage magicians, particularly those who worked with younger audiences.