Origami

Hello! Welcome to Origami

Our goal is to introduce more people to the unique art of paper folding called origami while helping them improve their skills and promoting artists and others in the international origami community.

If you’ve never folded anything before and want to learn how, we have an excellent guide for beginners. We have a giant database of free diagrams and video instructions too. Our blog features amazing work from a variety of very talented artists and we also have a collection of book reviews and recommendations.

The Beginner’s Guide to Paper Folding

Origami is actually a very easy hobby to pick up and it’s a lot of fun. All you need is paper and you can use pretty much any paper you can find. This guide will show you the main folds, the basic bases that are used as the foundation for a huge number of different models and then you’ll learn how to fold your first model, the traditional paper crane.

Types of Origami

1) Action origami
Action origami includes origami that flies, requires inflation to complete or when complete, uses the kinetic energy of a person's hands, applied at a certain region on the model to move another flap.
2) Modular origami
Modular origami consists of putting a number of identical pieces together to form a complete model. Normally the individual pieces are simple but the final assembly may be tricky.
3) Wet-folding
Wet-folding is an origami technique for producing models with gentle curves rather than geometric straight folds and flat surfaces.

4) Pureland origami
Pureland origami adds the restrictions that only simple mountain/valley folds may be used, and all folds must have straightforward locations.
5) Origami tessellations
A tessellation is a collection of figures filling a plane with no gaps or overlaps. In origami tessellations, pleats are used to connect molecules such as twist folds together in a repeating fashion.
6) Kirigami
Kirigami is a Japanese term for paper cutting. Cutting was often used in traditional Japanese origami, but modern innovations in technique have made the use of cuts unnecessary.

Mathematics and technical origami

Mathematics Origami
A more advanced geometry student or teacher might want to investigate relationship between math and origami in depth. You can take a look at these geometry exercises to get you started.
A number of technological advances have come from insights obtained through paper folding.

Technical origami
Technical origami, known in Japanese as origami, is an origami design approach in which the model is conceived as an engineered crease pattern, rather than developed through trial-and-error. With advances in origami mathematics, the basic structure of a new origami model can be theoretically plotted out on paper before any actual folding even occurs.
The crease pattern is a layout of the creases required to form the structure of the model.