Desire (2025)

22.5 x 31.5 in

The Discworld

Folded by Annalisa for my brother Jeff in memory of Terry Pratchett.

“…The Discworld–flat, circular, and carried through space on the back of four elephants who stand on the back of Great A’Tuin, the only turtle ever to feature on the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram, a turtle ten thousand miles long, dusted with the frost of dead comets, meteor-pocked, albedo-eyed. No one knows the reason for all this, but it is probably quantum.

Much that is weird could happen on a world on the back of a turtle like that.

It’s happening already.”

–from Pyramids by Terry Pratchett

Starring: Riccardo Foschi’s “Sea Turtle” as Great A’Tuin Fumiaki Kawahata’s “Elephant” as Berilia, Great T’Phon, Jerakeen, and Tubul cahoonas‘s “Red Blood Cell” (modified) as the Discworld itself

I did a lot of mods, however. I went to the Behind The Scenes post for the diagrams to the figures, but of the three I only ended up using one of the recommended designs. 

For the turtle, it’s a beautiful turtle but I didn’t care for the video (it was very hard to follow) so instead I used the Origami Club’s turtle here. 

I did use the recommended elephant figure with video by Leyla Torres; I think it’s one of the more adorable elephant figures out there. It’s not easy to fold but I had a really good time folding it anyway. 

The elephants are also remarkably stable, which is good because cramming them onto A’Tuin took some doing. No wonder the fifth one fell off. 

The original post recommends a modified version of @cahoonas‘s Red Blood Cell figure for the Discworld; they were playing with coloring and paper so I get why they’d choose it. I love that figure, it’s an interesting combination of complexity and simplicity and it’s really satisfying to fold. But for this purpose I found it a little too uniform; I wanted more texture for the surface of the Disc. 

So I went back to Origami Club and dug up the Ferris Wheel, which had the additional advantage of a blue rim for the oceans with a white center for the landmass, and central tips that could be folded up to create the mountain ranges at the Disc’s hub. 

All of my funguary quilts together (*ᴗ͈ˬᴗ͈)🍄

Chicken of the woods, destroying angel, black trumpets, pixies parasol aaaand wrinkled peach mushrooms.

Joe Kavik, Inuit artist, Bird, ND

Xenomorph frogs - Sculptures by Li Changchun