Introduction
“Overall, I want you to discover the joy of creation by your own hand…
Akira Yoshizawa
the possibility of creation from paper is infinite.”
If you’ve ever folded a paper airplane, you’ve done origami.
If you ever made a fortune teller/cootie catcher, you’ve done origami.
As a kid, when I went to see a movie at the movie theater, sometimes I’d compulsively start folding my ticket stub using classic origami moves. I didn’t know it then, but this was my first taste of origami “doodling.”
The word “origami” comes from the Japanese words “ori” (to fold) and “kami” (paper). Using the term “origami” for the global art of paper folding was popularized by Lillian Oppenheimer and others in the 1950’s, but the concept of using paper as an artistic medium has been around as long as paper itself (approximately 2000 years).
One of the great qualities of origami is how accessible it is. In just five minutes, you can learn to make a piece of art. It’s a low maintenance art form – all you need is paper – and even the simplest models can be satisfying to complete, even if the folds aren’t as precise as you’d like. Most of the origami I folded as a kid was from scrap paper we had around the house. How many people folded paper airplanes from pages ripped from their school notebook at some point in grade school?
Every model you create is unique. It may look a lot like the one your friend taught you, or like the image from a book of diagrams, or nowadays like the image from a video you watched online (I’m old school – I learned from hard copy books), but every piece of paper offers its own creative adventure. If you look at two copies of the “same” model, one may be more precisely lined up at the edges or creases than the other, or the crimp of the leg may be at a slightly more acute angle, giving the model a slightly different character. At first, it may be satisfying (and perhaps pedagogically advantageous) to execute the model exactly as the instructions demonstrate, but eventually it’s fun to go rogue and bring your own creative sensibility to your models.
I’m not a highly technical origami designer. I don’t yet have a deep understanding of the mathematic principles and techniques that elite origami designers use to expedite their design process or produce hyper-realistic, super-complex models. My background is in the arts. I believe everyone has a natural creative gift, and origami is a perfect medium to access it. Whether you identify as a right-brain person, a left-brain person, a visually oriented person, a kinesthetically oriented person, a mathematically inclined person, etc., you can find a way to create through paper folding.
To that end, my offerings are creative challenges. These challenges are meant to activate your creativity and imaginative exploration, not necessarily to lead you to the most intricate, complex, worthy-of-publishing models. They are provocations/launchpads rather than rules/instructions.
Before beginning the challenges, I recommend building up a basic vocabulary of classic origami models and maneuvers. Click here for my advice on how to build your Origami Toolbox, including traditional folds, bases, models, and a list of Recommended Resources.
And then, Click here to view the Challenges.
Happy Folding!