We all remember the time when we used to play with paper planes, paper boats, paper ninja stars, paper pinwheels and whatever thing we could possibly craft with discarded newspapers. Though some would say paper crafting is child’s play, several guys have interestingly elevated it to a kind of art. Access to computers and color printers have allowed paper craft artists to design toys made out of paper.

Papercraft is generally a hobby that involves working with paper to construct models. Papercrafting as a hobby is very broad with origami and 3d papercraft as two popular categories.

Origami is the ancient Japanese art of modeling paper. It requires folding a single piece of paper without cutting or applying glue. A famous origami design is the paper crane.

Though origami models seem simple, the complexity of geometric creases and folds had serious enthusiasts create new origami models with the aid of modern computers, an area called computational origami.

3d Paper Modeling or generally 3d papercraft has recently become trendy due to the availability of computers and color printers. Unlike origami, it involves the use of glue and cutting. As an example, the creation of the particular model below requires a careful design on how to come up with the Pikachu character, where to color, fold and glue pieces of paper. Current paper craft models are depictions of popular cartoon or video game character. Take this Pikachu papercraft as an example:

Due to its popularity, companies have also jumped into the 3d papercraft bandwagon. Canon and Yamaha are two of such companies.

If you’d like to view more papercraft models head on to http://paperkraft.net

References:
Canon Papercraft
Yamaha Papercraft
[Pikachu snapshot from paperkraft.net]