Papercraft

Papercrafting (the art of making 3D objects out of paper)has become my newest addiction. I discovered it a couple years ago with a YouTube video of a papercraft dragon you can make, and when viewed correctly it appears that it's eyes are following you. It was really easy to make, and once I made it, I wanted to find other papercraft to make. I discovered a site called RavensBlight. The webpage is based around a fictitious town, and has pictures ans artwork from the site creator, as well as some papercraft toys. The town is a horror inspired town, with characters like zombies, vampires, werewolves, and all the usual type of characters you'd expect. I made a few of the papercraft from that site, but they weren't that complex to make (except the SlaughterBot, which had movable and changeable parts), so I continued my search for more sites. Here's a picture of the SlaughterBot:


I then came across the ReadyMech site, which featured about 20 different papercraft models. Generally though, they all had a very similar design to them, and they were very easy to make.

After doing some more searching around, I hit the jackpot with CustomPaperToys, a blog about papercraft, with models created by the owner of the blog, as well as many links to other papercraft sites and blogs. These papercraft models weren't just box characters, but were all different. Among them are characters like Igor, Princess Kitty, Owwwl and Buck Shot:




From that site, I discovered many, many other papercraft sites and blogs.

One of the sites I discovered was Ninjatoes. The models on this site are all based after video games, or cartoons. The models are more complex than the other ones I've been doing, but I wanted to try something different. I decided to start off and try the Indiana Jones model. It was harder, and took longer than all the other ones I had made, but I'm really pleased with how it turned out. The instructions of the Ninjatoes' models are really done well. Instead of step by step text, with a few diagrams, its actual pictures of how to put it together, with accompanying text to explain certain things. Here are some picture on my Indy model, during construction and the completed model.



You can't really see it that great, but the third picture is the model next to a 12 inch ruler, showing how tall the model is. It's actual height is 13.5 inches tall. This is by far my favorite model I've made so far.I've just started another model from Ninjatoes; Young Link, from the game 'The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask'. So far, I only have his head finished, but here's how it looks so far (unfortunately, I'm still not that great at hiding the white parts on the joins, and you can see all the areas that where folds are made):


Because it's almost Christmas time, I decided to look for some Christmas papercraft models to make. Most of the ones I found were very boxy, or were models I had already made, but with a Santa skin instead of the regular one. Then I found this cute model of Santa, Rudolph and his sleigh. It came as three separate models that can be put together. Unfortunately, the site and instructions were in Japanese, but I still got it figured out, and I think it turned out alright.


I am constantly checking out all the pages I've used before for new web sites, and new papercraft models to make. Maybe one of these days I'll take a stab at making one of the papercraft model cities I've found that include roads, buildings, landmarks, building and even the people that live in the city. My only problem is that I'm quickly running out of room to display all of my models.