DIY Origami Model to Printable Detailed Origami Paper

This project shows you how to take a simple origami design, fold it, map it out to its basic shapes and then adapt an image and print your own 'pre-painted' origami paper.

In my example I take a simple origami angelfish that I designed and make colorful real image origami paper to create beautiful fish.

Why would you want to do this?

Origami was my first real craft obsession.. but the more detail you want the bigger your pages need to get. The other solution to adding detail is painting the finished piece.

I personally never liked painting my origami once it was folded. What came to my mind is that when you get origami kits for little kids (or on Japan Airlines flights), the paper already has some color and eyes in the correct places before you start folding: Why not do this with more realistic designs?!

A4 (or letter size) plain paper

Pen or colored pencils

Image manipulation or drawing software (I used trial versions of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Fresco for iPad)

Color printer

Scissors

I chose to use fish because of the absolutely endless colors and pattern variations a single species of fish, such as angelfish or butterfly fish can have.

To get my idea to really work well I needed an origami fish that was double sided. Unfortunately, all the really simple fish designs are one sided, meaning that the back side doesn't actually look like a fish. I started playing around and I ended up creating a new simple double sided angelfish design.

The steps are fully described in the attached pdf.

Taking the fully folded origami, you now mark the different areas of visible paper.

You need to know which side they are on, what they are, and which direction they face.

I did this using 2 methods (demonstrated on the same figure)

1. Coloring each section a different color
2. Outlining each visible area

for this simple design it's pretty easy to keep in mind which piece is which.

Once you know what the shapes are you have to transfer them to the computer (or iPad).

Using an illustration or sketching program on an A4 canvas create the square and map out all the pieces. I did this in Adobe illustrator and then transferred it to Adobe Fresco to start working with the pieces.

In Adobe Fresco using the wand select and duplicate I created a new layer for each of the shapes.

Note: I made the 'face' sides the entire triangle, so that there is now an overlap between the top and bottom fin and the face.

I then added a new layer with all the shapes and moved them around (some overlap) to create the side view fish shape.

The next step is to select a fish image to superimpose on the shape. The image needs to be in the correct orientation.

Clearly a real fish is not really quite as angular and uniform as the origami outline.

This is the point for the nudge tools, bending and stretching the image to fit over the outline and cover it.

One major angelfish issue is that the dorsal fin is much thinner than my outline, and the tail is longer. To correct this:

1. I marked out the dorsal fin, and duplicated it into a new layer. I then merged it with my fish and smoothed the double dorsal fin to a single fat one.
2. I pushed the body of the fish from the tail area toward the shape center. I then cut off the tail into a new layer, and squashed it shorter and stretched it wider. I then reattached it closer to the body.

(The really slow portions of the video are me moving single pixels around.)

Once the fish outline is completely covered its time to create a mask for each of the sections, in their original places on the origami paper. Don't forget that some pieces overlap!!!

This step was a little bit nerve racking... After carefully planning my origami paper to fit perfectly on an A4 sheet I discovered that my printer does not print border-less. This is where the scissors come in.

After my first successful print, I went and did another 2 fish patterns

Side note: My first attempt had a miss-calculation.. when 'folding' on illustrator I made the fins too thin. I had to go back to the illustrator to mark out all the outlines again.

I attached to this instructable the 3 fish that I created - ready to print and fold!

This method would work great for many other simple origami animals (and other figures) which share a basic shape and tons of color varieties, like butterflies, horses, dogs etc.

Random thought - these fresh water fish Pterophyllum scalare are extremely popular aquarium fish because through specialty breeding there are so many color variations.