How To Fold Origami

My name is Origami Mark; you can contact me on my website, which is www.origamimark.co.

uk. What I'm going to talk about now is how to get involved in origami, for anybody who is interested. What you need to do origami is very straightforward: you need a pair of hands that work properly, and a sheet of paper.

Any old sheet of paper will do - photocopier paper, that kind of thing. If you go for photocopier paper try and get thin stuff, because it holds pieces better and will last longer, and make you a better model. But of course you can get specialist origami paper which plops in at quite high prices.

Some of these papers can cost over £5 a sheet, so you know, you can pick your materials to suit your pocket, really. I've been doing origami since I was a child. I started off making paper airplanes - the paper airplanes I made had undercarriage and bomb bays and moving turrets whilst the other kids just made paper darts, and they probably thought there was something wrong with me.

Then I found out that there were books in the library; not many books in those days, I must say, but nowadays there are hundreds, if not thousands of books you can buy that will teach you origami at different levels. The kinds of things that you can get are anything from - look here, I've got - this is a book that's been very recently published by a friend of mine, John Montroll, over in the States, called Easy Origami. It has got 30 simple models in it - well, ranging from simple to sort-of intermediate.

You can get this kind of book, which is quite small, quite nice, right up to this kind of thing, which is more of a coffee table type origami book, which contains not only models, and how to make them, but has also got - there's some very beautiful photographs of models that other folders have made. So there's that kind of book you can buy. If you get really into it, we have here - I don't think you can still get this one, but Super Complex Origami - it's exactly what it says, in here, very complex models, very hard to make, you have got to have quite a lot of practice, before you attempt anything like this.

And those who want to study origami from a theoretical point of view, this is the origami Bible, Origami Design Secrets by another friend of mine from the States, Bob Lang. And in here, not only does he include lots of beautiful models, but at the back there's a mathematical treatment of origami, which might be of interest to some people. And Bob Lang has written some computer programs to assist people who want to fold origami.

You type what you want and it tells you how to do it, essentially. Well the kind of materials you can use, as I said, you can use photocopier paper, you can get proper origami paper - this paper is called CraftSkin. It's very thin, it's very crisp.

It's actually made from pine trees that are above the Arctic Circle, which means they grow slower, which apparently means the fibers in the wood pulp are much longer, which means the paper can be made much thinner, and much crisper. As you can see, it can hold quite vibrant color, but you can fold with almost any type of material that comes to hand. The rules are: square of paper usually, no cuts, no glue, just folding.