Papercrafting: Gamer Art from Office Supplies

Chalk another blog entry to "I'm way behind the times" if you like, but I just recently started to look at some of this Papercrafting in a more serious light, and I'm impressed. Origami (as talked about previously) is all about folding a piece of paper, but Papercrafting is all about folding, along with cutting and pasting. When you are allowed to cut and paste, you enter a whole new realm of paper art and as you would expect, the results can be downright astonishing.

Papercraft Samus Aran

If you start looking online for Papercrafting, you will no doubt discover that a large portion of the Papercrafting community centers around building video game characters and objects from video games. Because Papercrafting is essentially reverse-engineering a 3d model, people have been able to grab models from video games and lovingly recreate each polygon as a cut or folded piece of paper. There are sites dedicated to recreating Nintendo Characters or specifically Pokemon. Of course, there are different versions of the same character in different poses from different games.

Papercraft Castle

If you want to think outside the box and build an original piece of artwork, you can take a cue from this giant Papercraft Castle built in Tokyo, but you are going to have to start with the same basic materials. As suggested by Nintendo Papercrafting, you'll want to find some glue, a knife , cutting mat and some paper; unfortunately, the products they list aren't available outside of Europe. Powerpritt Universal Gel is suggested as an ideal papercrafting glue, but I think Elmer's Office Gel Glue Stick should work perfectly as it is easy to apply and will dry quickly. An X-Acto Cutting Set should be the perfect fit for you papercrafting cutting needs, the kit comes with a self healing mat and several replacement blades. Lastly, you aren't going to find any 120gms Card Stock around, but I dug around and this 67lb Bristol Cover Stock is just what you are looking for (at the equivalent of 148gms).

67lb Bristol Perfect for Papercrafting

Now that you've got your supplies, time to get out there and do some Papercrafting and create something.