Origami: Dragon Scale Fold

EDIT: Ok, so I double checked, what I made is actually the dragon scale, which is here and is slightly different than the fish scale, which I have done, but didn't do today. I'll do another blog post on the fish scale!

I've been going back and forth on folding origami masks. I'm taking a break from the origami balls I've put up on Etsy. The idea I have is for a fish mask, so I've been looking into scales. After getting maddeningly frustrated with the prototype I had going, I went to youtube. (Link is for the fish scale, which isn't what's below, see Edit above.) I will post on the prototype later. I found dragon scale folds, and here's the result. Sorry the picture's so crummy, it's with my laptop camera.

Dragon Scale Fold out of a square page of a book

It's a nice fold. Once I figured it out, it makes sense. It's basically a squash fold done over and over in a repeating tessellation. The scale pattern has to be done with the correct folds. I want to try it with a larger sheet of paper when I have more time to get more scales going, seeing as I only had time to do two scales.

Dragon Scale Fold from the side. Nice depth to it!

The squashing fold motion is complicated at first and rather frustrating. Book paper isn't the best for this kind of thing, it doesn't have any fold memory. The second you unfold book paper, it just forgets you folded the paper, especially for small folds, so forget pre-creasing anything. Useless! It made doing the second scale really annoying.

Also, you have to do the top scales and work downwards, at least, I had to do that with the book paper.

From the back. 

From the back it actually has a really nice effect and what I would want for the mask. I'm going to look into finding out how to get this look for the mask without doing the complicated folds for the front. Perhaps I can simplify the front folds somehow. The paper looks upside down, but it's not.

From the bottom.

You can really see the square base fold here. I'm getting very familiar with square bases as it makes nice scales and was what I was using in my prototype. It does look nice! Square bases, how useful you are! Get familiar with them, chaps, I will be using them a lot!