A Little Summer Sun

Last year, we planted some sunflowers in our garden in hopes of attracting more bees. What really ended up happening was that they grew so large that they stunted the growth of all of our veggies haha. This year we did the same thing but only planted them at the end of the garden instead of throughout and are having much better results!

Funnily enough, they also started popping up all over our yard! Last year the birds of our neighbourhood must have had a feast with all the seeds produced by the first wave of sunflowers and spread them around the yard. There were even some that appeared in the neighbour’s yards!

To me, sunflowers instill feelings of warmth and happiness, just like spending time in the summer sun with friends and family. So after being surrounded by sunflowers all summer I couldn’t help but feel inspired to re-create one out of paper.

This model ended up being much more challenging to design than I initially thought. After making the rose last year, I thought “How hard could a sunflower be? It’s such a simple, straightforward flower compared to a rose.” I ended up being pretty wrong.

The first speed bump was the petals. While they were very simple compared to the rose. The sheer amount of them took much longer model than I'd like to admit. This was mostly because I ended up tweaking and re-positioning them over and over again. At first, they looked too flat, then they’d look too curved. Then I had to adjust them so that the edges and faces didn’t overlap or intersect each other, which of course changed how they looked and started the cycle all over again.

There’s a good lesson in this that can be applied to any artform though. Eventually, you need to stop yourself and move on. With any project, you can always keep making little adjustments and improvements until you’re sick of it. What you need to realize though is that nothing is truly perfect and even if you eventually reach a point that you think is “perfect” other people might not think so. After all, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”.

Once I stopped the cycle of petal adjustment the rest of the model design went fairly smoothly. The sepals were pretty fun to make because they didn’t really need to look neat and tidy. The stem was fairly simple to make and my design to reinforce it was much simpler than the rose. I fretted over the size of the leaves a little bit but luckily I had a lot of reference material in my backyard to help me make up my mind haha.

The final hurdle that gave me trouble was the instructions. With over 500 parts it was quite the ordeal, mostly due to how blender seems to export svgs. They aren’t very clean and are made of more lines than necessary which roughly doubles the amount of time to make the illustrations. It got to the point that I debated making an instructional video first instead but decided it would probably be just as long or longer and kept going. I have my eye on some software dedicated to technical illustrations that should greatly reduce the time spend on them as well as increase the quality. It’s pretty pricey though so it’s probably going to be a while before I can justify getting it though.

It all came together in the end though and I am very happy with the results. After all the hard work I now have a little piece of summer that will last all year. And I get to share that little piece of summer with anyone else who builds it which is also a good feeling!

As always, it’s time to move on to the next project though. I’ve got lots of ideas and I hope to share a lot more of them!

Thanks for reading and happy crafting!

The Papercraftsman

The Last Metroid

Metroid has been one of my favourite series of games since I first played Metroid Prime back in 2002. There actually aren’t a lot of Metroid-themed papercrafts out there so I felt it was time to make one of the infamous creatures out of paper and change that. It’s actually no surprise that there aren’t too many papercrafts of Metroids specifically as there is a pretty obvious challenge: the membrane.

Metroid bodies consist of a clear membrane surrounding a central nucleus-like brain with some claws attached. This is something that is easy to accomplish in a video game but making it out of paper is obviously a whole other thing. The two main ideas I had were to make an arch to give the impression of shape or to use transparency film to make the membrane. After much testing and playing around with it I ended up focusing on the arch method as I felt the transparency tests weren’t satisfactory.

I think the arch method turned out very well though and I am very happy with the result. From head-on, the model resembles the Metroids from the original Metroid game for the NES. In addition, using the arch to create an impression of shape also fit with my “low-poly”, asymmetric style that also aims to give only an impression. So it worked very well for multiple reasons.

I didn’t entirely abandon the transparency method though as I did create an alternate version with a back shell to provide more shape. It also makes the model a little sturdier as well as a bit of a more challenging build too. I’m also going to keep experimenting with the transparency film to see if I can produce a better result so I may revisit this model again in the future.

Well, time to get back to designing more papercraft models. As always thank you for reading!

The Papercraftsman

An Octorok that wont hit you with rocks

My latest model is the second in my basic enemies series. It’s an Octorok! From the Legend of Zelda series, it’s been in almost every game since the beginning. Twilight Princess was actually the first game where they didn’t appear.

I mostly based my model on the in-game designs of the Original Legend of Zelda for the NES and the Minish Cap for the GBA. The laters influence is probably the most prominent. There have been a lot of varied and interesting Octorok designs over the years but I chose those games over the others mostly because I wanted to keep things simple this time.

The main reason I tried to keep things simple was that last month I spent roughly three weeks solely on learning Blender. This model was me giving the software a good test to see what it could do and test myself and see where my skills are at. There is still more to learn and I could use some more practice but overall I think the final result turned out pretty good.

All of my previous models were designed with AutoCAD which is a program that I have years of experience with but I have been wanting to move away from it due to the cost and the fact that it’s not very good with organic shapes. Blender doesn’t seem to give you as much control over some aspects of the modelling process though so there is a bit of a trade-off but I would still say it’s a better tool for my purposes.

There are still some things I need to improve on such as the “smoothness” of the vertices. Blender has a tool to help you with that but I don’t think I used it as much or as well as I could have. I say this because I noticed some areas of the model that were a little rougher than they needed to be when I was assembling it. If I had used AutoCAD to make the same model I wouldn’t have had to worry about this as I would have started with a smooth surface and aligned my vertices to it, essentially the opposite of how you would make it in Blender. Some of the shapes, like the tentacles, might not have turned out as nice though so again there’s a bit of a trade-off.

In the end, I am very happy with this model though. I think it turned out great and it was a lot of fun to make at every step of the way and ultimately that’s what’s important; enjoying your hobbies :)

Thanks for reading and happy crafting!

The Papercraftsman

Not very spooky

Here we are in late October, the leaves have changed colour and there is a frosty chill in the air. That’s when people want to see cute little ladybugs, right? I know it’s not very fitting with the season but I’m the type of guy that likes to finish what I start, so when the idea popped into my head halfway through the bee I felt the need to see it through to the end.

Overall, I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out. I have been messing around with using triangular grids for the models and tried to apply some of what I learned to this one. It’s probably most evident in the eyes which I’m sure people will agree look much better than the bees eyes which are a tad blocky.

I’m not sure how often I will use them in the future though as I find does significantly increase the polygon count, which also increases the amount of potential parts, which increases the amount of cuts and folds required. All of that is fine for me to do, I personally don’t mind the added complexity, but I am always thinking about other potential builders. I know not everyone wants something so “involved” especially if they’re just getting into papercraft so I always try and keep that in mind. I could always just be overthinking things though haha

Thanks for reading and happy crafting,

The Papercraftsman

A buzzing little bee.

My latest model is a cute little bee!

I felt I needed to do something a little simpler compared to my previous models as well as make something that was completely my own design. I also decided to make this my first “premium” model as well, a term I’m not thrilled with to be honest, but it was the only thing I could think of at the moment. I still plan on making free models though, so don’t worry if you don’t have money to spend on papercraft! Generally, going forward if anything I make is based of an existing copyrighted design it will be free and if it’s my own design there will most likely be a price attached to it. Anyway, back to talking about the bee!

I was mostly inspired by the beehive in my sisters backyard. She let a local apiarist store a hive there this summer and it was very interesting to say the least. Whenever I was over there visiting I would spend some time observing them coming in and out of the hive. It’s oddly calming watching a bunch of tiny insects go about their tiny lives. At a glance, it seems like chaos but at the same time you know there is a function and purpose to it. Hundreds of tiny bees, each with a task to perform in order to keep the hive functioning. They don’t need to be told what to do or how or when to do it, they just instinctively know. I’m still not really sure why, but thinking about that is what felt so calming.

I also figured that each bee must be pretty content in its role in the hive which is what I tried to convey in my papercraft pattern. I gave it a small like smile that says “I’m happy” and small little legs that look like they’re relaxed and dangling. Combined with the bulging eyes and rotund body these features result in a bee that looks like it doesn’t have a care in the world, content to just go about it’s tasks.

Thanks and happy crafting,

The Papercraftsman