Origami Beetles of the World (Origami Sekai no Kabutomushi) (in Japanese)

This book is written entirely in Japanese and, as I cannot speak nor read Japanese, nor am I an entomologist, I was forced to rely on the nice, clear colour photographs at the beginning of the book to discover at least what the beetles will look like, even if not what they were called.

There are 14 models in total, ranging from a very simple, legless grub through increasingly complex looking creatures to a beetle with 6 legs, carapace and a 4-pronged horn. But generally the beetles all seem to be of the hard-as-nails-giant-fighting-samurai type that some Japanese keep as pets and, indeed have fights with.

I would like to stress the “complex looking” part of the previous paragraph. These designs are much simpler than they appear, because they are 2, or even 3, piece models. None of your single-square-purism here! In fact some of the beetles do not even possess the full complement of legs, the effect being suggested rather than actually depicted. The resulting beetles still look pretty good.

The diagrams, like most Japanese origami books are clear and easy to “read” and the folding sequences were sufficiently different to what I might have expected as to cause me to re-assess the creative possibilities of a single piece of paper.

This book is not super-complex origami and should not cause many problems to an intermediate folder.