Papercraft: Kill a tree... but get a toy!

I remember making my own paper chess board as a child. It was a primitive creation, with badly shaded chess pieces drawn on paper squares. I was quite proud of my creativity, but my parents were repulsed at my apparent frugality. They bought me a real chess set the next day.

This leads me into underground world of papercraft. It's a fusion of origami, urban style, and graphic design. Papercraft has been gaining a lot of popularity in the last few years, especially since the recent collaboration of major papercraft players in publishing Urban Paper.

There are practical applications of papercraft, such as the CardBoy calendar, the Voodoo Stubey toothpick holder, and a working pinhole camera. Then there are various pop-culture papercrafts, such as Build-O-Bama, Cubee TMNT, and many many superheroes. Some papercrafts are different designs on the same templates, such as the avian Nanibird template, the squirrelish e440 template, the ursan 3EyedBear template, and the canine Speakerdog template.

I love the creativity, and the edgy balance between cute and strange that all the good papercraft artists seem to revel in. The papercraft community is fairly "open source" because they usually make the model templates freely available for download. So fire up your inkjet printers and grab your scissors! It's time to fill up your office shelves with quirky papercraft.

PS: Mom and Dad? This could have been me: Chess set papercraft