Big-Eared Jack-O'-Lantern v1

(A cute model for spooky season/Halloween!)

There are many great origami jack-o'-lanterns already, so I wanted to design a slightly different one - a jack-o'-lantern with ears inspired by a certain mouse.

About the design process: From the beginning, I wanted to form the jack-o'-lantern's nose from one corner, the ears from adjacent edges, the lower mouth from the opposite corner, and the bow near the middle corners. The challenging part was finding an appropriate structure to express my desired features. I first tried to reuse the ear structure from my big-eared mouse model. That was suboptimal since the jack-o'-lantern needed different color changes, and the old ear structure would have used too much paper. Starting over again and using some of my favorite reference points as a guide (22.5-degree corner angle divisions and the resulting intersections), I placed my desired features near the reference points and tried out some possible bases. The final base I chose is pretty efficient, has easy reference points, and is different from my big-eared mouse model.

The model is tricky near the nose flap since pulling too far can rip the paper but relatively straightforward to collapse and fold otherwise. The collapsed base can be used to create different models and variations, too - the plain base looks like a superhero or animal face to me.