Monday 25 May 2009

Extreme Papercrafting

I've been spending the long weekend at a science fiction convention - Plokta.con. Lots of silly stuff has been going on but one of the workshops at the beginning of the weekend was "Build a model of Howl's Moving Castle". I had no idea what it was I was getting myself into, but hey, it involved paper, scissors and glue so it couldn't be all that bad, surely.

Well, here it is. We estimate that approximately 10 people have spent an average of 7.5 hours each working on (some, like me, have spent more, some a lot less), and today (Monday) we completed it!

This was a free download from Epson Japan in 2004 when the movie was released. It has since come down off Epson's website and some person with initiative has done a (kind of) English translation for the instructions, and posted it up somewhere else. When I find the URL, I'll post it for you.

It was designed to be printed on standard weight paper in

A4. We printed it in A3 which is 40% bigger and I'm so glad! At A4 size, there are parts of this that are so small, I would go cross-eyed trying to cut it out.

If I had to print it in A4, I'd probably run it through my Silhouette software and get the cutter to cut it out.

It was great fun and having so many people collaborating probably made the whole process easier because when the sketchy English instructions became incomprehensible, we worked out where things were supposed to be by committee.