In the beginning!!

The first models that I built was the spiky baby's as shown in the previous post, these were simple little models that were quick to make and FREE being the main word here as I was just getting into the hobbie!.

The models were designed by a young man called Shin Tanaka, he is situated in Japan and his philosophy is that his models should be freely available to download and make, and then his work passed on by word of mouth.He is now rated amongst one of the top Papercraft modeller's in Japan.

His first series of spiky's contained 15 versions and since that time he has published 8 series of spiky baby's, in total 178 models, each different and most of them designed by different artists.

He has also published models for Masked hoodies, Hoodies, Boxy's and his new models of Hoophy's, again designed by different artists.

It's a good thing in a way that shin gets artists to do designs for his models as it shows off his work and other artists work at the same time. It has let me go searching for other works by the different artists in order to expand my horizons.

Here is my collection of models by shin Tanaka the only ones that are missing are the new hoophys but i'm designing a couple of new designs at the moment but will show them off in a later post.

you can find shin Tanaka's works at http://shin.co.nr/

Welcome one and all

Before we get started



Hi my name is andrew I'm 42 and I am originally from England but have lived in scotland for the past 20 years. I have only been making paper/card models for just over 3 years now and only really started the hobby due to me having an accident on a bmx, I crashed off a jump broke my clavicle in my shoulder,cracked some ribs and ended up with a bruised brain which then led onto me having short term memory loss which basically meant that I would not really be able to carry on working as I am a harm to myself and others!.

So to go from 6 days a week, 60hrs a week working to doing nothing was a bit of a shock to me as I had'nt even been off work with a cold or any other illness for about 20 years ( I'm sure I hold the cure to the common cold in my blood!!!). I started to look around the web to see what I could take up as a hobbie, most of the things that I saw did not really intrest me but then I came across a website with characters made from card and this made me quite interested as I had not seen or heard about it. The website was run by a young man called Shin Tanaka and he had a couple of characters called "spiky Baby" and "masked hoody", these I looked on with intrest and so I downloaded the sets straight away and proceeded to make them.

It was from that point that I was hooked to making models and toys from card. I still keep in contact with shin via email and due to his work it opened up a whole new world to me and has shown me that the card craft is not really just a hobby but a way of life to thousands of people all around the world and now 3 years later and about 600 models later I'm still finding new and challenging ideas to make and build. In the coming posts I will introduce to the people that I am driven by and the models that I have taken on over the past years.