Papercrafting

Papercrafting is as old as paper and everybody has tried it, if not just by folding a paper airplane.

In Asia it's quite a big thing. Origami (making paper models by folding paper) is not just a hobby, but an Art. Just like growing mini-trees is an Art.
Therefor I don't think it's a coincidence that the biggest sites for paper models are hosted by Japanese companies: Canon -at least check out the architecture section- and Yamaha.  The ultra realistic models of the latter are amazing.

Apart from these models that try to get as close to reality as possible, there is a scene of mostly young independent creators who design 'arty' paper models, mostly called paper toys. See the nice paper toys site for a taste of all the zillions of funny, angry, cute, sad, tiny or beautiful figures.

Up to now I was a happy consumer of paper models that other people created. I work continuously but slowly on a bigger project, like the Sagrada Familia model from Canon, but I do paper toys in between. The bigger projects are taking weeks or months to finish and the paper toys are a nice snack in between.

But things have changed! Yesterday I visited a workshop by 3EyedBear, one of my paper toy design heroes or paper engineer, as he calls himself. Also present at the workshop were Marshall Alexander, MCK and Dolly Oblong, all famous paper toy designers (and very nice guys and dolly's).

Especially the input of Marshall and 3EyedBear have convinced me to start designing myself and, as is the custom, present my work to the world through a blog.

So here goes! Even the longest journey starts with a single piece of paper.