Video Game Papercrafts: Heavy Rain Origami And More!
Heavy Rain and the Origami Killer
Recently, due to the release of Sony’s Heavy Rain for the PS3, many gamers are suddenly finding themselves interested in crafting and Origami specifically. Heavy Rain features a serial-killer villain called the “Origami Killer” because of the Origami bird he leaves behind with his victims as a calling card. The game itself, sort of an interactive murder mystery about a serial killer, was very well-received by the entire gaming community, and generally garnered rather exceptional reviews. Due to the strong writing and the lasting psychological nature of the game, the Origami Killer, and his signature calling card, remained in a lot of people’s minds after the played the game, and it’s no surprise people would want to replicate that item. Origami is a Japanese word that translates loosely to “folding paper,” and is, unsurprisingly the Japanese art of folding paper. It’s easy enough to find instructions for making the Origami bird featured in the game itself. They’re even included on the game’s installation screen. But why stop there? There’s plenty of other Origami designs to be made if you want to continue with them, and there’s a lot more that can you can make from paper than just Origami.
Video Game Papercrafts
What makes “Papercrafts,” as these other models called, different from actual Origami is that they often involve cutting and gluing in addition to simply folding paper, but if you don’t want to stop at just making Origami models, they can still be a lot of fun and can be a great way to obtain a few great-looking paper models to adorn your shelves. For those of us who have a crafty side and want to be able to express it while still expressing our nerdy side, the internet is filled with opportunities of exactly those sorts of papercrafts. The instructions given with them will generally include a template telling you where to cut, fold, and glue, as well as where to color the item in so that you end up with a perfectly recognizable model of the character or object you’ve made. In fact, many of you have probably even seen some of them before, but rest assured, if you’re wondering where to find more of them, there’s a ton of them to be found, and whatever it is that you want to make, we’re here to help you find it. Keep reading for examples of some of the best places online to find instructions on how to complete various video-game related papercrafts, including, of course, the instructions for the signature piece of Heavy Rain’s Origami Killer.
Papercraft Resources
This is a site with a great variety of different paper crafts, mostly of the pop culture variety, and if you’re not picky about exactly what you want to be able to find, it’s an excellent place to start. It doesn’t use tags or have sections, so your only option for searching is to look through the archives, as every one of the blog’s post title does name the craft being showcased, or to use the site’s custom Google search, which is helpful enough if you have a specific idea in mind, but it doesn’t make it too easy to find a page of all their videogame crafts, for instance. The site is a blog that collects links from various places on the internet, so many of their posts come from the rest of the sites this article is going to talk about, but it’s still worth looking to them as well every so often, especially if you want to make more than just video game models.
This is a site full of a specific sort of papercraft. Everything is, as the name would suggest, cubed. Rectangular boxes and cubes for heads. It creates a very cute looking version of any character as they end up looking more like polygonal bobbleheads than anything else. They do have some crafts of objects such as game consoles as well, and those end up looking pretty natural as rectangles or cubes since they’re mostly that shape to begin with. They don’t have a very searchable site, but they’ve only got a few different categories on their main page, and they’re all pretty obvious. The “console crazy” tab has crafts of the specific games consoles, there are a couple tabs that have specific game titles as tabs, and beyond that, there’s a decent number of videogame crafts in the pop-culture tab, mixed in with the rest of the pop-culture stuff they’ve got.
This site is pretty self-explanatory. It’s a collection of nintendo-related papercrafts. There’s some really great things here, so I would definitely recommend perusing their archives and finding some things you might want to build. They have a nice variety of posts, from objects such as game consoles as well as in-game items such as Link’s Master Sword, or the Maxim Tomato from Smash Brothers, among many other things. There are also templates for plenty of the characters from Nintendo games. They have a list of buttons down the right side of the page, each pertaining to a specific label. Each label leads to a page containing models related only to that label, making for a reasonably searchable experience if you know what kind of thing you want to make and you want to stick to that theme. This is an excellent site, but it is entirely Nintendo-related models, so if you were looking to make anything that’s not Nintendo, you’ll have to find a website that serves a broader spectrum, which leads us to our next choice.
This is probably the best papercraft site on the internet, and it’s my usual first stop if I feel like making one of these. It’s a blog like paperkraft that collects links from other sites, but it’s much more extensive and easier to navigate. It has a massive number of crafts from all sorts of video-game related categories, and is obviously not confined to any one area of interest such as everything being Nintendo-related or anything similar. The site also many other categories if you feel like branching out. It’s got a list of category tags down the right hand for you to click on, which also makes it the most searchable site of any of those mentioned here. Some of the tags are more specific if you’re looking for models from just one specific game title, but there is also a “games” tag that leads to a page containing all of their video-game related crafts, a category with just under 200 posts.
Heavy Rain Origami
Of course, we have to talk about the origami model that Heavy Rain’s big bad uses as a calling card. This is the item that brought many of you here, after all. This is also the only piece mentioned in the article that is truly Origami and only includes folding. For a lot of you, your interest in video-game related papercraft probably starts right here. The instructions are included on the game’s installation screen, but you can’t very well print those out for reference later. Of course, that’s what makes the internet such a wonderful resource, and a quick check online reveals that someone’s been kind enough to draw up those very instructions for you, giving you a resource you can hold on to permanently. So when you’re done reading this article, grab a square piece of paper (if you haven’t already used the piece of Origami paper that Heavy Rain ships with for precisely this purpose) and check out
, courtesy of Destructoid.com. Fold and unfold along the dotted lines in the first two steps to make visible creases, and otherwise, fold in the direction of the arrows and leave the paper folded in that manner before moving on to the next step.
More Great Crafting Resources
For those feeling a little bit crafty, the internet is full of resources. From Heavy Rain’s Origami model to Mario’s Head, to your favorite Pokémon or even characters like Sephiroth, you can find instructions to make almost anything you can think of. This article showed you some of the best places to look for video game papercrafts, but there are a lot more places to find great papercraft templates, specially if you don’t confine yourself to videogames. And of course, it doesn’t have to stop at papercrafts. There are plenty of possibilities for those of you who are interested in them. Why not make a stained glass window depicting a Pacman map, or embroider a pillow with the Triforce? If you’re having a hard time coming up with those sorts of ideas, Etsy is a great place to start for anyone interested in handmade crafting. It’s sort of an Ebay for handmade things, and it’s populated by its fair share of nerdy types as well, so there’s all sorts of fun stuff there too. It’s a good place to get ideas or to buy things that you might not want to make yourself. Of course, even that is still only the beginning. There’s a lot more places to find handmade things, and the internet is a vast resource, so just keep searching, and before you know it you’ll have more figurines and models than you have places to put them.
