Awesome Papercraft

Office supplies maker Viking Direct surprised its employees by installing a 43 foot-long dragon made out of paper in their office. A few employees worked with artist Andy Singleton for 10 days to build the impressive sculpture. It’s now installed in a school.

(Loud) Aliaksei Zholner decided to see if he could make a working reed pipe organ entirely out of paper and cardboard, with bellows powered by the weight of a book. The resulting sounds are a little silly, but it’s a cool bit of papercraft engineering.

Zupagrafika’s cut-out model book lets you build your own cold and impersonal miniature city filled with the brutalist architecture of Central and Eastern Europe. Includes seven buildings from Serbia, Moldova, Russia, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Poland, and Russia.

Kiwami Japan is back with another ridiculously improbable knife construction – an impressively-sharp kitchen blade made from pressed cardboard. We weren’t quite sure what he was up to for the first few minutes and thought we were watching HowtoBasic.

The linear windows of Frank Lloyd Wright’s iconic structures are the perfect subject for Marc Hagan-Guirey’s book, which comes with 14 cut-and-fold models based on buildings from the Frederick C. Robie House to Taliesin West and the Johnson Wax building.

Japanese paper goods company Triad presents a wonderful series of notepads which are sliced in such a way that they reveal intricate sculptures of locations and objects as each layer is peeled away. They’re currently sold out, but it sounds like they’ve got more in the works.

Kelli Anderson’s This Book Is a Planetarium, features six usable pop-up constructions, including a tiny planetarium, a Spirograph-like drawing machine, a secret decoder ring, and an acoustic amplifier. Each object is accompanied by an explanation of the science behind it.

Artist Xavier Segers aka “The Last Dodo” created these incredible insect images by precisely placing letters from various fonts. See if you can guess what font each one was made from, then head to the bottom of his Behance page for the answers.

Filmmaker Christopher Helkey introduces us to artist Peter Dahmen, who creates complex and intricate pop-up structures from paper. We loved learning about how he got started, his build process, and watching the movement of each sculpture as it’s opened up.

A unique and puzzling desk sculpture you can build from a dozen pre-cut playing cards to form a 5.5″ tall starburst. Professor George W. Hart figured out the geometry to make it work. Learn more about his mathemagical card sculptures here.

Artist Ayumi Shibata painstakingly cuts intricate, layers of buildings, trees, rocks, and other structures, then layers them together inside of glassware to form incredible miniature cityscapes. Be sure to check out the Shibata’s amazing papercut tower too.

Papercraft artist Taras Lesko of VisualSpicer shows off an intricate piece of wall art which can be cut from a single sheet of paper, assuming you’ve got the X-acto skills. Think you’re up to the challenge? Buy the PDF template here.

Nowness inspects artist Tauba Auerbach’s oversized pop-up book set [2,3]. It consists of six separate volumes, each with one large, complex and arresting pop-up that somehow still folds flat when its folio is closed.

To promote their new of Game of Thrones signature notebooks, Moleskine commissioned Dadomani to recreate the HBO series’ opening credits using intricate papercraft models. The end result is decidedly shorter than the full credits, but no less impressive. Making of here.

Paper engine maker Aliaksei Zholner made something different but no less amazing. His working Stirling engine scale model uses ice and hot water to manipulate the pressure inside its cylinder and generate power. It’s made of paper, cardboard, tissue and lots of glue.

Aliaksei Zholner’s miniature engine factory continues to progress. The papercraft artist’s latest work is a functional rotary engine. It has three main parts and like its predecessors is powered with compressed air.

We’ve seen YouTuber Aliaksei Zholner’s papercraft V6 and four-cylinder miniature engines. One of his latest creations is a V8 engine. As if that wasn’t awesome enough he also made a working throttle for it.

Wonderfully illustrated paper models of classic warplanes that not only look cool, they actually glide. The bi-planes are great, but we’re suckers for the bent-winged Chance Vought F4U-4 Corsair. To be honest, after all the work it takes to build one, we’d be afraid to toss ours.

Last time we checked in with artist Luca Iaconi-Stewart, he was building an intricate paper model of a Boeing 777 out of manila folders. Here, he applies his same incredible knife and tweezer skills to craft a replica of a Singapore Airlines Airbus A380.

Halloween may be over, but that doesn’t mean you can’t still wear this awesome papercraft dragon mask by RPS Creations. After printing out the template, you have about 8 hours of meticulous cutting and taping, but the end result is worth the effort. (Thanks Matthew!)

Last year, architect Charles Young set a goal to make one small papercraft building a day for a year. He ended up doing just that, creating Paperholm, a city made of whimsical buildings and objects. You can buy some of the models here.

YouTuber Al Zh made a miniature scale model of a V6 engine using paper, glue, tape, and rubber bands. It “runs” on compressed air, and the sound that it makes is awesome. Like an old boat motor. He also made a paper inline-4.

Uhu02 makes detailed papercraft models of ships and characters from science fiction. Many of them have prints and pieces for inner layers. His Apollo 13 Lunar Module is mind-blowing. The best part? He gives away his templates on his site.