Kirigami Greeting Cards (Kirigami Craft Books Series)
Shay Silvertooth
Simple and easy to master designs
Practical use for creations: greeting cards, table decorations etc
Compiled and designed by the Marie Claire Ides group a renowned and respected international hobby craft brand
Emphasis on the modest and traditional aspects of the Japanese craft
The traditional art of paper cutting and folding explained here in simple terms. The book contains 40 delightful projects, by two papercraft designers, to help you hone your skills. The projects include pop-up greetings cards, Christmas decorations, flowers, tea-light holders, wall dcor and much more. With great photography, easy-to-follow instructions and all the necessary templates, each project is graded as to cutting and folding difficulty, so this book is suitable for anyone from beginner upwards.
This book is a collaboration between two authors: Laurence Arnac has a background in graphic design, and Ho Huu An trained as an oceanographer but has a love of papercraft. There is much to admire in this title but I wouldnt recommend it for the papercutting novice. You have to be pretty handy with a craft knife to manage any of the beautiful projects. Having said that, each of the 40 papercraft projects is labelled both for cutting and folding difficulty. And there is a good tutorial section front-of-book which includes a diagram of practice cuts for learners. As you would expect, this is a template-based book. The projects are divided into Card Projects, Table Decorations, Special Occasions, and Christmas. Theres pop-up card action aplenty, plus several boxes and ornaments. One of the cards, Celestial Sphere, is a beautiful star-topped slice form (slice forms are amazing interlocking 3-D constructions that fold flat to send). Cosmic! And I cant imagine anybody not being suitably impressed by the baby grand piano pop-up.
There are several lovely Christmas decorations that you could send as gifts, such as the Snowflake Wall Hanging or the Reindeer Wall Hanging. This book is intended for hand-cutters, but if you have a digital papercutter, you could scan in the pattern and make them up (for personal use only, that goes without saying). To sum up: a pleasant collection of papercutting projects with year-round variety.
The traditional art of Japanese paper cutting and folding is fully explained in this book. 40 projects have been included for you to hone your skills. You can make greetings cards, flowers, tea light holders, wall decor and more. The projects are graded as to difficulty so this book is suitable for anyone from beginner upwards. Gorgeous projects including pop ups. I really enjoyed this book. Includes templates, easy to follow instructions and great photography.
Kirigami is a Japanese paper cutting craft, accessible and easy to master for all levels of crafter. This new books contains a selection of 40 projects all accompanied by detailed and thorough instructions and diagrams which are easy to follow and master. Templates and photographic step-by-steps are also included. Follow the projects to encompass pop-up cards with a difference.
A paper galleon emerged from a hanged frame, complete with foaming waves. It was just one of many artworks: historical buildings, people, plants, a whole world of paper. I remained long in front of that stall talking to the author of those marvels. He taught me this technique and gave me the instruments to begin making my creations.
You can make easy pop-up cards, where the figure appears when you open the paper, or you can make complex works of art. The making of such sculptures when they represent architectures is also called architectural origami.
There are examples of kirigami drawn with CAD software and laser-cut, making more and more complex figures. Other architects are developing Artificial Intelligence systems that are based on kirigami to look for solutions to the most complex design problems.
In this style, a folded paper is intricately cut so that when it is opened to a 90-degree angle, a three-dimensional image emerges, resembling the mechanics of pop-up books. This style is popular for its ability to create dynamic and visually striking designs.
Less common but equally fascinating, some designs require opening the paper and folding it completely in the opposite direction, forming a 360-degree angle. This approach allows for fully immersive and panoramic designs that captivate viewers from all angles.
A crafting tip. I use a proper kirigami knife, but any paper cutter would do the job. Use the blade to cut, and the back of the blade to trace the lines you have to fold: it will help you give a clean, sharp and straight fold.
A few years ago my family and I moved to northern Scotland, where the winters are long and the nights seemingly without end. And so, in order to beguile the many hours of darkness, I began working with paper. I have been doing origami for over a decade, but here I quickly moved on to kirigami, fascinated by the possibilities I found available by interrupting the folded surfaces that origami generally likes to keep intact.
Paper is magical. It made its way to Japan as a new invention 1300 years ago, and soon afterward, as it became more affordable and accessible, origami grew into an important part of Japanese culture. There it developed mostly in isolation for a long time, set away from the academic mathematical innovations that were occurring in the Western and Near-Eastern worlds. There is some evidence that Europeans experimented with paper folding in the 1400s, but nothing on the scale or interest level of what Japanese had been doing at that point for centuries.
In the 1800s, as European artistic culture advanced, paper folding started to spread as a handicraft, and to catch the eye of some of the creative giants of the day. Still it was mostly only used as an exercise, a kind of pedagogical stepping stone to other concepts, rather than an art form in its own right. Then, in the mid-20th century, two things happened, or should I say, two people. Akira Yoshizawa standardized origami diagram notation, invented new and innovative ways of folding, and also actively evangelized the form. Origami was getting worldwide recognition. And Masahiro Chatani followed. It was Chatani, an architecture professor in Tokyo, who added cutting into the folding art, popping up both figurative and geometric structures, and pioneered what is now known as Origamic Architecture. He published more than 50 books.
I mentioned Chatani and Origamic Architecture. His pop-up models were very often quite figurative. Buildings and houses, greeting cards, flowers. But he also designed and published numerous patterns for more abstract pieces, pop-ups based on pure math and geometry, and very beautiful they are, too. Since his death, however, the world of OA has continued to evolve mostly in the former direction, and not so much in the latter. People are cutting and folding incredible things under the rubric of OA, but almost always figurative, leaving the more abstract branch of the tree largely untended.
So my very long-winded point is that there has been a conversation happening, a dialogue about folding paper, for more than a thousand years. During that conversation, ideas have been exchanged, digested and synthesized, other disciplines and cultural understanding have been absorbed and incorporated, as the history of papercrafting has evolved with all its many facets into the modern world. I am doing something which, I hope, advances that conversation, helps to push it in an interesting and neglected direction, and I want as many people as possible to see it, even as I keep inventing it, so that into the future others might pick up the thread and take it in new, even more interesting directions. I want to participate.
When I started exploring, my design tools were basic: a red pencil, a blue pencil, a regular pencil, and some graph paper. I figured out the templates in 2D, starting from the most basic principles and building blocks, then cut them, folded them up, and learned from my mistakes before starting over. But as this method requires slashing all my calculations to bits in the act of cutting them, I quickly moved to Adobe Illustrator. I used it just the same, like digital graph paper, only with the advantage that I could print my templates out, fold them, change them, and print again.
Before too long I was writing simple scripts in Illustrator, to automate what mathematically repetitve portions of my design process I could. Eventually though, even that began to show some serious limitations, and so I ultimately buckled down and wrote a whole new piece of software from scratch, iteratively codifying my gathered intuitions into an environment where I could design algorithms, functions and graphs, code them into my framework, and then manipulate the results before cutting and folding by hand.
This system clears the way to focusing more purely on the mathematics of form, within the limits of a sheet of paper. Algorithmically it's nothing too fancy, relying mostly on high-school math: algebra, lots of trig, basic calculus, and matrices. My son, 16 years old at the time, is an absolute whiz, and keeping up with his homework helped me rekindle long-forgotten ideas, which I try to translate into new designs.
People often ask about the tools I use to make my models. So here is a quick rundown, many of which items also link to where you can find them for purchase. These are my opinions; please use these preferences only as a general guide. Everyone likes to choose whatever works best for them.Over the years, I have grown increasingly picky about my tools. It's very much personal taste, of course, but for my money, there's no better blade than the Olfa Art Knife. It feels better in the hand than any Xacto or Swann Morton scalpel I have ever tried, it's well-made and doesn't slip. Leave it to the Japanese to make a good kirigami tool, right?
7fc3f7cf58