Skills From Origami Papers

easy way of folding origami paper art

One of the things that first attracted me to origami as a child was that the tools were all around me; all I needed were my hands and a sheet of paper, and I could find paper anywhere! For many years, I used pads of obsolete business forms from my Dad's business, cut to square. Nowadays, the equivalent paper would be copy paper—used or unused. And all it needs is to be cut (or torn) to square, and you're ready to fold.

For simple folds, copy paper works very well. It takes a crease nicely and doesn't easily wrinkle. And you can find it almost everywhere. But as the world of origami has progressed over the last few decades, the complexity of origami designs has grown, and for many designs—and almost everything I compose these days—copy paper is just too thick. You'll need to look for other sources.

Magazine and Newsprint

Even more ubiquitous than copy paper is magazine paper and newsprint. Both are tempting, particularly because they are generally much thinner than copy paper. But if you try them out, you'll find that magazine paper and newsprint are really lousy papers for origami. They have two big weaknesses: they are weak (and so tear easily), and even worse, they don't hold creases very well at all.