Introduction in Origami

Today I've decided to start a new series of articles about origami, the traditional Japanese art which consists in creating paper figurines. For the beginning, you should know why it is called "origami": the name comes from the Japanese words "ori", that means "to fold", and "kami", that means "paper".


The base of origami is folding the coloured paper, for representing different animals, birds, boats, flowers etc. obtained by various combinations of surfaces and lines. There is the possibility of creating a large diversity of figurines, which confers a plus of originality to this art.

Some people treated origami as a simple game, but the most of them considered it as art, due to the possibility to represent creatively and realistically different subjects. The true beauty of the origami art is...
the simplicity consisting in the ability to express the essential features of the objects, aiming to simplify the forms to the purest limits.


The origami crane is one of the most important Japanese symbols.

In origami you can make simple models, for example a cat...

But origami can be much more complicated: such as the upper dragon, created by a master in 2 years, with only  one piece of paper!!