How To Make An Origami Butterfly

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

uk. Now I'm going to show you how to make a traditional kawasaki origami butterfly. Obviously, you can use whatever paper you want, but I'm starting off with a piece of paper that's obviously square, blue on one side, white on the other.

The first fold you do is to fold it diagonally. While we're at it, we'll put the other diagonal in at the same time. Open the model up, and we find that we've got three mountain folds, because they look like mountains, and a valley fold, because it looks like a valley.

Make the valley fold into a mountain fold. You can then squeeze the model together to form what we call a water bomb base. We're not going to make a water bomb today, we're going to make a butterfly.

To make the butterfly, you've got two at top, and you've got two flaps at the bottom. Fold the top two flaps up to the top point. Turn the model over, make a little guide crease along the center.

What we're going to do now is take this thick center point at the bottom and fold it just beyond the raw edges at the top of the model. At this stage, you'll notice that you're starting to pull on the corners here. The model won't lie flat, don't worry about that.

But you need to get a point--in my case, we've got about half an inch of the point sticking above the raw edges. Then we flatten the paper down as best we can. At the bottom here where it doesn't lie flat, we simply squash it flat to form a little V.

Do the same on the other side. Form a little V. And try and make these two edges, these two corners, as symmetrical as possible, so you've got the same amount of paper.

With this top point that we've just been carefully constructing, fold that back over the model and then fold the point back up again, so that we've got a little triangle sticking above the top of the raw edges that we have. Next thing we do is we fold the model in half, and the next thing we do is we make a crease from where the head started down to this point here where the paper crosses over itself. So you make a crease.

Already you can see what it is. Do the same on the other side, and we have an origami butterfly.