New paper craft toys are constantly being developed, and now I think it’s time once again to have a look at some of the many free paper craft toys available.

• Rommy No.02 – Cute robotlike paper craft character sitting down, made by Japanese paper engineer Tetsuya Watabe. Both paper craft toy and instructions are available for download.
• Hoophy – Shin Tanakas hooded characters. Several artists have contributed to the development of Hoophy. David Flores, Superdeux and Skwak are amongst those who have designed their own versions.
• Macula – Christopher Bonettes many characters are very different from each other, and they are all available for download at his site. There are, amongst others, a deer, holiday characters and several different monsters. Both colored and blank templates available for many of the characters. Find all of Maculas paper craft characters at the top of the page.
• Loulou – Several different character designs, all decorated using lovely color combinations. One of the characters is a slightly confused robot.
• Marshall Alexander – Marshall Alexanders site is full of funny characters. He has a wonderfully clean and colorful way of decorating his paper toys. Two of my favorites are Bite Me (screaming lady and shark), and PaperBoy (boy and dog with cardboard boxes over their heads.)
• Horrorwoods Calling All Cars – Blank template of a car with a driver. Decorate your own version and share it with the world by sending it in! It will be made available for free download at some point. Keep an eye on the Horrorwood blog if you’d like to keep yourself updated on the latest entries.
• Panda – Big bellied blue panda ready to be downloaded at nykocity.
• Nanibird – Small birds in lovely colors. There are five collections containing several versions. See all Nanibirds under “The Birds” in the right side of the site.
• My Little Cthulhu – Frenchman Jerome has made a paper craft version of John Kovalic’s squid-like monster. This character is available in green, orange and black.
• Mecha – Paper model of Mecha, a robot from the popular Japanese anime series Space Runaway Ideon. This model consists of many small parts!

A tip: Draw any template onto blank paper, thereby creating your own blank templates, and decorate as you’d like! Use you imagination! Just remember that it is someone else’s creation you’re playing with, so play with it at home, but think twice before using it for other purposes!

An absolutely amazing paper craft installation by the art student Wataru Itou in Tokyo. Hand made over four years. More details and more pictures at Tokyobling.

Need some fun and educational activities to engage in together with the kids? Spend a couple of minutes browsing YouTube or Metacafe and you’ll discover lots of educational “how to” videos of experiments that’ll make time pass quickly for both kids and grownups.

Following is a few of my favorites.

Bristlebot- The little toothbrush robot

One of Evil Mad Scientists videos on Metacafe, “How To Make A BristleBot” , shows you how to make a small robot that drives around by itself, by the use of the head of a toothbrush, a pager motor, two copper treads, foam tape and a watch battery. It’s a simple experiment with lots of educational value. It can keep your child occupied for quite some time. A more detailed description on how to make the Bristlebot, and what you need to make it, can be found at Evil Mad Scientist.

How to Make Slime

Good video on how to make toy slime, in any color you want, in an easy, low cost way.

How To Make Hot Ice

This is weird, and so cool. Small as well as big boys will love this one. Liquid becomes ice when you touch it!! Could make hours of fun! Have a look at the video.

Balloon Hovercraft

D3stiny at Metacafe shows you how to make a balloon hovercraft. It’s quite easy.

Unbelievable Origami Toys

It is incredible what you can make with just a piece of paper, a bit of tape and a few crayons! Following are a couple of videos showing you how to build little paper toys for/with your children. The first one is the good old Jumping origami frog toy. One piece of paper becomes a frog that jumps when you pat it on the back. The second one is The twisting hexagon, very difficult to describe, so it’s better you just have a look at the video! If you find these fun you should keep an eye on all the related videos that appear in the right side when you play the videos as well!

Have fun!

Amongst all the free paper craft downloads around the Internet, there are lots of simple, fun and decorative paper figures made by artists and designers. These paper figures are easy to put together, and the detail is in the graphics. These figures can often be downloaded in several fun and versions, including blank templates, for people to apply their own graphic, paint or draw on. They are perfect for kids (and adults) of all ages.

I have made a small list of some of the very cool and simple paper craft figures that I’ve come across lately. If anyone’s got more of these that they’d like to share, please leave a comment!

• Speakerdog – simple, fun and available in lots of different versions made by different graffiti artists, illustrators and graphic designers.
• Readymech – cool, simple and charming figures.
• Gloo Man – choose sex, hair type, belt buckle and other details before downloading your personal Gloo Man!
• NANA – cool and detailed figure with removable helmet. (Click second preview from the left to see the figure. Click arrow to download PDF.)
• Flicker Monkey’s figures – simple and cute.
• Custom Paper Toys Owwwl – fun, detailed (cool skeleton on its back) with movable parts. Besides the owl there is four other free downloads.
• e440 – Cool squirrel figure. Five versions (at the time being), including a blank template, all are available for free by contacting the blog author.
• Cutnejo – charming rabbit.

Now, for those who’d like to make some cool, paper models, but would like to start with something a bit easier than the Millennium Falcon, can have a look at what they offer over at Toypaper. There are some pretty cute monsters over there.

Toypaper also offer other models like a sneaker and the “Hand Holder”, which is plain white and allows you to customize it by drawing and painting.

For those who like animated paper toys, you should head over to Flying Pig, which offers lots of animated paper crafts. At Flying Pig there are free downloads but for most of the toys you have to pay a small amount.

Via NOTCOT

I have recently become aware that there are huge amounts of incredibly detailed, and completely free, paper crafts available at different websites. It seems to be common to offer models as PDFs free to download. Especially the Japanese seem love to make all kinds of cool stuff out of paper, and they are pretty good at it too!

Finding crafts that will interest and challenge older kids can be difficult, especially when it comes to boys, but I bet it’s possible to find something interesting and quite challenging for most older boys and girls, amongst all the free models available out there. I’m talking spaceships, trains, planes, cars and robots with amazing details and shapes, some even have movable parts.

Yamaha has an amazing collection of paper models free to download, in different colors or white. They not only have lots of different motorcycles, motors, and other parts for bikes and garage, but they also have a great selection of animals, insects and seasonal paper models.

One of the ultimate paper craft models to make is probably the Millennium Falcon from Star Wars, which can be found at SF PaperCrafts. It has exceptional details, and looks amazing when done. SF PaperCrafts also offers other models, like the U.S.S. Enterprise from Star Trek and the Star Wars AT-AT Snow Walker with movable parts! They’re all available for download at SF PaperCraftGallery, ready to cut, glue and assemble.

For the Battlestar Gallactica fans out there you should take a look at the paper models of the Battlestar Gallactica Viper at Papertoy Box. They also offer other planes, a train, cars and a robot, and everything is available for download, ready to cut out, fold, glue and assemble. At the site you’ll find image instructions of how to do the assembling.

A couple of “simpler” paper craft models of the X-fighter and the Millennium Falcon, can be found at CFSL. These are made from Parisian Metro Tickets, or heavy paper in the same dimensions, which can be found in the descriptions. Even though simpler, they are still pretty amazing!

Now there is no lack of characters either. At the Japanese website, Piro model, there are lots of detailed characters from e.g. Star Wars. Some of the characters are formed as Lego figures with movable arms and legs.

If you got as excited about this models as I did, and have the time and urge to make models of your own, there is even a program, Pepakura, available as shareware, (Some features, Saving and Exporting are restricted to the bought version.) that allows you to turn 3D models into paper crafts! Nice! There is really tons of free and educational fun here! Also, remember to check out the Pepakura gallery where people share pictures and links to their own models.

Via Toysrevil