Just thought I’d post some updates on my Papercrafting since I’ve been silent for a while.
If you’ve been following my comments on some of my previous papercraft posts (Bulbasaur and Charmander, Squirtle, Tepig) you know that I’ve had Lapras in progress and that I’ve been planning to make a Mewtwo.
I got Lapras done enough to display at our local Anime and Videogames convention, AVCon. It had everything except the flippers – a pretty good effort for a couple of weeks solid work, I think! Since AVCon I actually haven’t picked up the Lapras parts again, so I haven’t been able to finish it off. I guess my interest has waned since I solved the major engineering problems involved in getting the head to stand.
Here’s Lapras with me for scale. This was taken the night before AVCon. At the time I honestly didn’t know if it was going to work – getting the head to stand was a huge triumph.
When I wasn’t supervising the models, some kid crawled inside Lapras! You can see his legs through the side of the model.
As for Mewtwo… in December last year, pokemonpapercraft.net released a Lucario model, which I decided might make a better subject for my first attempt at a bipedal Pokémon. For a start, the finished model would stand at about half of Mewtwo’s size (1.2m vs 2m). Its smaller size also meant that each piece that I cut out would quite nicely fit on my cereal box cardboard, which is much nicer to work with than the cardboard that I used for Lapras. And in general, Lucario’s limbs are much less intricate than Mewtwo’s.
Over the Australia Day long weekend (exactly two years since I made Bulbasaur!) I got most of Lucario assembled. He used about 24 cereal boxes worth of cardboard… after saving up my housemate’s cereal boxes for a year I’m now almost completely out of boxes!
Here’s an in-progress shot of Lucario. I’ve been working on making this one in modular parts that can be slid in and out of the model. I learned from Lapras that if something is going to be big, or if you’re not sure about how the pieces are going to fit, it’s easier to deal with things if they’re in their own pieces. If you need to remake something, then you can just remake a single piece instead of having to take apart the whole model and potentially start from scratch.
I hope to finish Lucario off soon – since these photos I’ve already completed his arms, tail and legs – just the hair bits to go!
