Tutorials and Diagrams

On this page, I have a collection of tutorials and diagrams. I am very new to my graphic design software, so the diagrams may be hard to read. However, I did my best to try to walk through every step of some of my simpler models. Hopefully, I get around to making more diagrams of more models. But for now, this page will have a select few things I've done. 

Do you want to start designing origami? 

No book or video is gonna teach you. Not even Robert J Lang's book (honestly, I didn't learn a whole ton from the book. Most of it was mathematical theorms, which by themselves, were super interesting. But to my designing, not too applicable). So what's the secret? Well, I don't have it, that's for sure...

But I think I can describe how I started designing: the best way to start designing is to...

1) ...Play around with some paper. If you have folded origami for any amount of time, you should already have a basic artistic intuition of how paper folds up (think maybe a crane, or a frog base). Start from those bases, and play around with existing models to give them your spin. Maybe use the crane, for example. Play around with the head and the tail, fold out the wing differently, unfold a step, and see what you can do.

2) Once you have simply played around the paper, fold some more pre-existing models. Look at the structure of the model and find out why the designer used that particular fold. 

Why was a reverse fold used here? Why did we collapse the base in this way? 

Hint: most of all origami can be boiled down to 3 steps...

• Collapse 

• Thin the appendages 

• Final Shapings 

...and the final two steps can even be combined because they are aimed at the same thing: transform a base into a distinguishable shape. 

3) After you have done a fair amount of experimenting with paper and making variations of pre-existing models, you can start learning design methods others have developed over the years. 

I recommend looking at some of these resources, they go over basic design that may be helpful:

• Boice Wong's crease pattern class here

• Brandon Wong's design class here

• Of course, there's some very fundamental information in here, but it is still a great book :) Robert Langs Origami Design Secrets

• Abrashi Origami School has some very good resources. If you need to look something up specific, using this is sometimes better than trying to search in the index of ODS!  

• If you need some inspiration, I go over my design process in this video...here

There are many more resources I have... I'm not sure if I'm allowed to share them here since I technically didn't write them. But if you join the origami dan discord, it might be there! 🫣

Have fun folding!

More Resources (for your entertainment): 

Inkscape: The design software I use. You will need to download Java for the program to run properly. 

Gimp: Photo editing software, a good free service if you don't have Adobe!

Orihime: The crease pattern software I use. It's a little dated, but it serves the purposes I need. Oriedita is a more current software to use: Here

OrigamiUSA: Organization that hosts the majority of origami conventions in the US

CFC Diagrams: Good place to get a variety of origami diagrams

Origami Resource Center: The diagrams are hit or miss here 

OUSA Diagrams: One of the best places to get solid origami diagrams, also most are in a portable document format. 

Origami-shop.com: One of the best online origami shops to get high-quality paper. 

Kraft Roll: Good practice paper and you can easily cut big paper. 

Best Way to Cut a Square: The best method hands down (I've tried a lot of them)

Crease Pattern Collection: Neorigami, an archived blog from the 2010's. He has good magazine-type content.

Crease Pattern Drive: Other Crease Patterns