The simple lizard was my first origami design! If you want to fold this, the crease pattern is below.
Most origami design starts with creating a tree structure representing the rough shape of your final figure. Then, you covert terminal nodes in the tree into circles to pack into the square, with each circle corresponding to a spike as long as the circle’s radius in the final design. In this case, the final model looks basically the same as the tree diagram, so we can jump right to the circle packing:
This is an example of box pleating design, in which you sacrifice optimal circle packing in exchange for easier foldability. Instead of packing circles, you pack squares, which makes sure that all resulting folds end up at 45 or 90 degree angles relative to each other. The few folds on the diagram which are not at these angles are shaping folds for small extra details like narrowing the toes and tail.
Here are pics of the steps of the folding process:
Excitingly, after posting the design, I actually got a few messages from people who folded it!
