Miffy Papercraft - The Little White Bunny

Here is another cute paper model creation by Kei Kraft, this was commisioned by Asahi.com in recognition of Miffy, the loveable little white bunny created by Dick Bruna, one of the most famous creators of picture books in the world. Miffy is a very popular character in Japan, and if you have not noticed it by now, Japan likes cute and cuddly animal characters.



Miffy Papercraft [via mediafire]

Asahi Shimbun Dog Papercraft

Today we have a beautiful paper model of a dog from Asahi.com, Asahi Shimbun is one of the oldest and largest national leading newspaper in Japan having 8.27 million in their morning circulation and about 3.85 million for its evening edition. They print paper models on their newspapers from time to time or on special occassions. Here you could see they have commisioned a very nice paper model of a dog from Kei Craft.



Asahi Shimbun - Dog Papercraft [via mediafire]

Totoro Papercraft

Totoro is the big cuddly star of Japanese animation film Tonari no Totoro, which was released in the U.S.A as My Neighbor Totoro. Studio Ghibli fans, you know what this is. For those of you who don't have any clue, I highly suggest you watch My Neighbor Totoro or any other Ghibli film for that matter. Other titles include Howl's Moving Castle and my favorite, Spirited Away. This paper model is hosted by Mokumoku.

Totoro Papercraft [owari.ne.jp]

Food Patrol Papercraft

Here's a set of three (3) Japanese cartoon paper model from Mokumoku, each of the characters are holding a different kind of utensil. They're quite easy to assemble and makes a fun decoration for your kitchen or dining room. They are hosted and created by Mokumoku.



Food Patrol Papercraft [Mokumoku]

Paper Craft for Beginners Video

I just finished doing a beginners video that demonstrates how paper models are done. This was shot with a web cam so pardon the quality. The original video was 1.4GB, then I compressed it to 64MB, and then another, that ended up at 19.4MB using the Xvid codec. That's the smallest size I can encode the video without compromising the quality too much. The paper model I used in this demo is the Kabuki Bear by Moichi.



Kabuki Bear - Download - http://www.boreas.dti.ne.jp/~moichi/

On the following days and weeks to come, I will also do instructional videos on other paper crafts and origami, so just stay tuned for that.

Before I begin explaining this video, please note that all of this notes are based on my personal experiences and that technique varies from person to person.

Part 1 - Cutting - This is really the simplest part but you should also be careful at the same time, try to look at the entirety of the model before you start cutting, note that I did not use the cutter for this project, In my experience in paper crafting I have seldomly used the cutter for cutting the outlines of the models, I mainly used narrow tip scissors for all of this. I do however use the cutters if there is something to be remove or cut from inside of the paper model and for very minute detailing. Once you have cut the paper models, its time to move on to. . .

Part 2 - Folding and Creasing - This part can either be really easy or really difficult depending on the paper model, there are three techniques that you should be familiar with when doing paper crafts, the mountain fold, valley fold, and tubulars. ( I will be doing a demo on this in my next video). When folding you should learn to use your power of observation and visualize at the same time to enable you to easily determine which part goes together.

Part 3 - Gluing and Assembling - After you've folded and creased the parts this is where visualization comes handy, once you've figured out how to put them together, start putting a small amount of glue on the glue tab. The best to determine if you've put the right amount of glue is when you press the glued surfaces and no glue comes out. After you've glued and assembled them together, relax, pat yourself in the back and enjoy your new paper craft model.

Tip: If your hand starts sweating, make sure you dry them real well before continuing, you don't want to smear the ink on your paper model.

Happy Hamster Papercraft

I've received quite a few emails regarding my first post - Tetsujin 28, that beginners are finding it very hard to complete. Well, starting today I'm going to try and post both beginners and advance paper models alike. Here's a cute paper craft hamster from Yo & Motoko's Home Page. This is a very basic model, so beginners would fine this very helpful.



Happy Hamster Papercraft - Download

Happy Valentine's Day Part Three

Today is really a lovely day, here's yet another set of pop-up cards for Valentine's Day. And we've got pop-up card designer Maria Victoria Garrido from Barcelona, Spain to thank for. The available Valentine cards for download are marked with a red asterisk on the left side of their title. Check out her complete works at:

http://marivi_10.tripod.com/myhomenew.html



Valentine's Pop-up Cards

Happy Valentine's Day Papercraft Part Two

A second batch of paper model cutsies just in time for Valentine's Day, from Flying-Pig.com and Paper Museum by Sanwa Supply Co. from Japan.


Snap-up Heart
Valentine's Boxes

Happy Valentine's Day Papercraft

To all the romantics out there, here's a beautiful collection of Valentine's Day pop-up cards from Canon:


Pop-up card (Chocolate Cake)
Pop-up card (Heart Box)
Gift Box A
Gift Box B
Card

Compression Software Basics

I just received an email from one of our readers and she had problems opening the file she downloaded from the previous post about Klonoa, she said that the file is neither PDF nor PDO but LZH.

I'm going to to a brief discussion on this problem, the LZH file is not a different kind of paper craft pattern but instead it is a compression file and is also known as an archive file, what this means is that the provider of the paper craft pattern has used a compression software to compress the PDF file, they do this so that it would be easily downloaded or for those people who do not have a fast internet connection or simply those who use 56kb dial-up internet. The LZH compression file acts as a container that holds the PDF or PDO file and at the same time trimming down the overall size of the file. So, how do we open this file? Well, will get there in a minute.

First, I'll enumerate some compression/archive file extensions commonly used for paper craft patterns.

1. ZIP
2. RAR
3. LZH
   

There are a lot of file compression/archive formats out there but we can't discuss all of them since most of them are rarely used, instead we will focus our attention on the three formats that are widely used, but if you want to read about all of the different formats here's a helpful link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_archive_formats

Now, we go into opening this archives. The two most popular compression/archive software out there is Winzip, followed by WinRAR. This two do exactly the same thing, they compress, archive, and decompress files. The only difference is the way they do it, but were not going there since that is very technical and not really necessary. Winzip and WinRAR can open all of the popular archive formats (ZIP, RAR, LZH, etc...) but can cost you between $30 - $50.

Lucky for you I like free stuff, so here it is:

http://www.7-zip.org/download.html

7-zip is a free compression/archive software, owned and hosted by 7-zip.org, it can do whatever Winzip and WinRAR can do, and have I mentioned that it's FREE.

Klonoa Papercraft (including Moo)

It's a cold and lazy day today in Webster, and to get ourselves busy here's a paper model of Klonoa and Moo, if you are not familiar with that name/game, Klonoa is an anthropomorpic videogame character created by the Japanese game developer Namco, for the Sony Playstation video console back in 1998. For those of you who don't follow videogame history, Namco is also the creator of the very famous and successful franchise/videogame character, Pacman. As reference to this you can see a Pacman logo on the side of Klonoa's trademark blue-backwards cap.

The other character is Moo - he is one of the most common enemies you'll find in Klonoa the videogame, much like the ShyGuys and Goombas of the Mario Brothers franchise.



The paper model is easy to build, it took me about an hour to finish both of them. Klonoa is about 7 1/2" tall, and Moo is 4" tall. The files are in PDF format, hosted by Namco China and you can find them here:

Klonoa Papercraft [Namco-ch.net]

Shigaraki Raccoon Dog Papercraft

Here is a cute paper model of a Shigaraki Raccoon Dog papercraft, now you may ask what is a Shigaraki Raccoon Dog? to be brief, Shigaraki is a village in Japan that used to be its capital waaaaay back in the early days. A raccoon dog, also known as a "tanuki", is a dog which for all arguments resembles a raccoon, including markings and body structure. The Shigaraki Raccoon Dog is a local celebrity in Japan, in which they create figurines for it. The man who started this was Tetsuzo Fujiwara, a ceramic sculptor who focused most of his work with ceramic raccoon dogs that have different facial expressions and unique shapes, which in turn started a tradition of this loveable Shigaraki Raccoon Dog dolls and figurines.



This paper model is in a PDF file, created and hosted by Chokipeta.jp - a company very well known in asian and european countries for creating beautiful paper crafts.

Shigaraki Raccoon Dog Papercraft [Chokipeta.jp]

Alternative Software

As I've mentioned in my previous post that you need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open PDF files, I forgot to mention another free software that I use on my other computers for PDF files. It is called Foxit Reader, and it is from a company called Foxit Software. The reason why I'm mentioning this is for those paper crafters who have an old computer with less speed, cpu power, and hard drive space that can't handle Adobes' bloated and slow startups. Foxit Reader is free, it requires no installation, is less than three (3)megabytes, and the best part is that it supports all of Adobe Readers most important features.

Foxit Reader - FREE - www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

I have also mentioned on my previous post that you will need to buy Adobe Acrobats' standard or professional edition in order to create your own PDF files, but thats going to cost you between 299 to 449 bones, another free alternative software for creating PDF files without shelling out big bucks is PDFCreator. This software installs as a printer driver in Windows and lets you specify output settings (paper size, resolution, etc.) This means that you can create PDF files from any Windows program that's capable of printing. How this works is after you've created a document from any Windows based program (Word, Photoshop, Powerpoint, etc.) you will use the Print command on that software and choose "PDFCreator" as your printer, a dialog box will show up and ask you to specify a filename and other optional information, just fill em in, click Save, and choose a location to save your file. After saving it, your document is now converted to a PDF file - easy, simple, and free.

PDFCreator - FREE - www.sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator

Note: All software programs mentioned in this post is Windows based, if you are having trouble downloading or with installation, please leave a message and I'll try to help you the best I can.

Paper Craft File Types

Before you get started with your paper craft project you need a pattern, this pattern comes in different formats, but I'll talk about the two(2) prominent ones that are mostly used.

First, we have the most widely used pattern, the PDF file, as I've mentioned before, the PDF file is an Adobe technology for formatting electronic documents so that they can be easily viewed, distributed, edited, and printed on different systems while preserving the layout(fonts, images, graphics). To view a file on PDF format, you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader which you can easily download for free from Adobe's web site. This free PDF viewer is only good for viewing and printing PDF files, if you plan on creating or converting files to PDF format, you would have to buy either the standard or professional Adobe Acrobat software, in which case, you would be paying between $299 to $449 - so unless you really need it I suggest you stick with the free reader for now. Once you've downloaded the free reader and installed it, it will automatically start whenever you view a PDF file.

Adobe Acrobat Reader - FREE -

The second most widely used paper craft pattern is the PDO file, the PDO file is from a Japanese company called Tama Soft, their software is called the Pepakura , there are two varities one is the Pepakura Designer and the other is the Pepakura Viewer, like Adobe's software, the Pepakura Designer (as the name implies) is for creating PDO files and is worth $38, the Pepakura Viewer on the other hand is free, which is what I like the most ( I guess we all do).

Pepakura Viewer - FREE - English Version

The other paper craft formats, but not widely used, are in JPG (Joint Photographic Experts Group) and GIF (Graphic Interchange Format), these are really just picture formats that came from a converted PDF or PDO file. They can be viewed with any graphic editing/viewing software such as Microsoft Paint, IrfanView, Google's Picasa, etc...

Dragon Papercraft Illusion

Here's a FREE paper model of a dragon (optical illusion) with a head that seems to follow you around when you move about. You simply cut the pattern, glue or tape it together, and put it on a table or any flat surface, then move around and watch it's head follow you. This paper model is downloadable as a PDF file. Please note that this paper dragon is the property of Binary Arts, which is now known as ThinkFun.

Dragon Papercraft Illusion [Grand-Illusions]

Paper Craft Tools

I received a lot of inquiries from people that are just starting or new to paper crafts about what particular tools and paper I use, nothing fancy here, I just bought my entire paper craft tools from walmart. Here is a list of basic tools for starting with paper craft:

1. Craft Knife - If you want a knife that would last, I recommend the Fiskars brand, the one with the ergonomic shape, replaceable blade, and SoftGrip technology for maximum comfort and control (I use blade #11).
2. Craft Mat - this is where you are going to do your paper cutting, I prefer the "self-healing" mats. (I use a 9"x12").
3. Scissors - any kind of narrow tip/blade scissors would do.
4. Glue - any type of crafting glue would do, but I prefer the ones that dry clear ( I use Elmer's white glue)
   
5. Small Plastic Paint Pallete - this is optional, I just use this to hold my glue in small amounts.
6. Ruler - any 12" would do.
7. Printer - any type of colored/bubble jet printer or you could also get your stuff printed at your local print shop.
   
8. Paper - you could use any brand of paper, as long as they are:
   

• Heavy A4 (210 x 297 mm) or regular (215.9 x 279.4 mm) paper
• 110 to 135 lbs (0.16 to 0.18mm thick) - this is also known in the U.S. as Card Stock Paper