Our paper hearts

Hey, Jess here!

Yes, that title was a reference to one of The All American Rejects' songs! But there is a reason for it. (As if I'd ever do anything without a reason, pfff.) The last few days I was a my boyfriend's place. And of course we spent a lot of time outside walking and all that. But the weather was really annoying; it was quite warm, but also very moist. It really was like walking in a tropical climmate and that's very hard on me unfortunately. That's part of the reason we decided to stay a little more inside and work on some pepakura (a.k.a. papercraft) projects.

One of the templates

This is really awesome to do! But what do you do? Well, maybe the name suggested it, but you work with paper. Maybe origami or something like that comes to mind, but it's a little different. There are gradations in difficulty, but you're always working with templates. Some people are awesome (and skilled) enough to create those templates. But I don't think I'm wrong if I say that most of us just find things they like on the internet and download them. When you download the files you want, you can open them in a program (my boyfriend uses Pepakura Designer) and you can see a 3D-model and all the parts you need to print and cut out. Through this program you can also see what needs to be folded, where each part goes and all that. You can also zoom in on the 3D-model, turn it around and select the different parts individual to have a clearer view. When you have found something you like, you print the templates. The amount of sheets you need, depends on the project you're going to do.

The head is done

When you're done printing, it's time to cut it out. I prefer to cut everything out in one go, but that's because I really hate cutting and I just want to be done with it. My boyfriend prefers to cut one or a few things out and then put it together, cut something more and put it together and so on. This may be a little smarter, because you won't be disorientated as easily. When you put things together, you do it with glue. I don't think it really matters what kind of glue you use, but when you're working with colored templates, you should keep it clean, or it won't look as good as it could. Also! It's important to use thick paper. Not too thick your printer can't handle it, but a little thicker so your projects will be stronger.

So we were planning on making some Pokémon with this. I have done some simple ones way back (I'll show them sometime). We started by figuring out which one we wanted to do. This was quite hard, because there are so many to choose from, haha. In the end we decided to start with Aron. We thouht it was cute so..... alright, I think it's cute. But can you blame me? Anyway, we didn't think it would be too difficult to start with. It turned out to be a little more time consuming than we thought, haha.

Done!

At first we printed out the templates. For this Aron we had four sheets of paper. Compared to other things, this isn't much at all, but the scissors we had were really annoying, so I was glad we bought better ones after that. While I was still cutting, my boyfriend started putting things together. He's done some larger projects already, so he's a little more skilled at it than me.

After we finished that Aron. I worked on a Shuppet and he did a Roggenrola. Later on we did another one together. This was the Master Sword from The Legend of Zelda. It was a very small one standing in a stone. Because it was so small, it was really hard to fold some things, but it looked quite alright.

At the moment I can't wait to be working on those projects again with him. We have downloaded a lot of things we want to make, so there is enough to do, haha!

To be continued...