Zaera

I realized that I don't post half of the things I make, either because I'm my own worst critic or forgetfulness. So I've added a few items to my gallery that I've done over the last year and forgot to put up. I've been very busy lately with some projects for other people, so I haven't had a chance to do what I've wanted to do until recently.

A friend of mine is producing a Power Rangers fan film called Zordon of Eltar and I've been helping with some of the costume pieces. If you're an MMPR fan (I was obsessed as a kid), you should check out the pre-production Facebook page here. It's definitely been an interesting experience to create craft pieces that people actually wear. I've always wanted to try to create a cosplay outfit and I think that I might after this experience.

Back into papercraft! I just designed my first model from scratch last week to be converted into papercraft. I'm really excited about the project but I am sure I have some DA Watchers that were hoping for some more League of Legends models. I do plan to go back to making them sometime soon, but I wanted to start with the craft again doing something I really wanted to do.

I'm always working on two or more projects at a time and sometimes they take a few months to complete, depending on how busy I am or what games I am playing. I just uploaded a bunch of photos of projects I've done throughout 2012 that I'm rather happy with. Some projects get ditched halfway and others never make it off the drawing board. I'm very proud that I was able to teach myself to knit this year. I've also been experimenting with cross stitch and making patterns based on images. Unfortunately, I can't share the complicated cross stitch project I did this year because it was for my sister in the Air Force and must remain top secret.

Despite the fact I haven't uploaded anything to my DeviantArt since August 2011, I've still been working on a ton of projects. Unfortunately, none of them include Papercraft (besides attempting to teach the boyfriend how to do it). I wanted to wait until I had a new Papercraft project to upload before putting anything new up after all of this time (to appease people who only Watch me for that sort of thing), but I have so much stuff just laying around that I wanted to add that I will go ahead and do it anyway.

I do plan to complete a new model sometime soon, the only thing I've done since August was a Starcraft 2 Baneling for my boyfriend's birthday, but the pattern wasn't mine and I didn't feel the need to share it.

Hey Everyone,

I figured I would just write a kind of FAQ here to answer a lot of the repeated questions I receive as comments on my Papercraft works.

Q: Do you have the template available for download?
A: Unfortunately, no. I hate to seem like a jerk, but to create a template that would work for anyone but me would probably involve an additional week's work on top of the time it takes to do each one. The other issue is that I am still learning and there are still many mistakes I have to fix as I'm building the models. By the time I discover these mistakes, it is really too late to fix it. If you change something in the model, you have to redesign the template from scratch because it is now a different model, so in reality it is probably more than a week. There's quite a bit of "fudging" that goes on that I make as invisible as possible.

In the future, when I perfect my technique, I may provide templates. I'm not trying to hoard them, I promise

Q: That's paper? How?
A: Yes, my papercraft models are made of 100% card stock, good old Elmer's glue and printer ink. The card stock I use is 199 gsm, 110lb paper and is extremely durable. The models have no problem standing on their own (except in the case of a model like Kog'Maw where it isn't balanced to begin with, so I put weight in his tail )

Q: How big are they?
A: To kind of give an idea of how large the models are I am working with, Cassiopeia is about 11" high, Kog'Maw is about 12" long and Anivia's wing span is about 21". They all fit very nicely on shelves

Q: What's the process?
A: Long and semi-complicated It involves extracting the models from your media of choice (I love League of Legends, so all of my current models are from there). Then the models need to be imported into a 3D model editor to be tweaked. That step is absolutely necessary and fairly time consuming, especially in the case of League of Legends models. Models are not designed with paper in mind. There are a lot of disconnected seams, overlapping polygons and objects hidden inside of other objects that will not play nice if you try to make a template from it. After I tweak the models, I dump them into a program called Pepakura. This program allows you to "unfold" a model and will create the tabs for you, but that is about where the automation ends. This is the second time consuming part of the project - creating seams, correcting tabs and layout. There's a lot of visualization, of how the model will piece together and where you want the seams to show up, that needs to be done here. Once the layout and tabs are finalized, the model gets printed out (typically on about 12 sheets of paper for most of my models), cut out with an Xacto knife (or some other precision tool) and glued together (I use Elmer's white glue and a paint brush)