ARTIST SPENDS 3 YEARS FOLDING AN ORIGAMI SAMURAI OUT OF ONE SINGLE PAPER

Artist Juho Könkkölä uses origami to make paper figures. His sculptures are incredibly detailed, even though they just involve folding rather than cutting. A samurai is depicted in Könkkölä's most recent work, which is also maybe his most striking. The warrior is portrayed holding a sword, and the artist even managed to capture the essence of traditional armour, such as the scaly haidate (thigh armour) and the pointed kabuto (helmet). It's difficult to imagine that this intricate samurai was created without ever applying glue or puncturing the paper.

Könkkölä told a media house during an interview, “I got the idea for the character from my previous origami samurai warrior, which I did almost a year ago (March 2020). The artwork was a success on its own; it pushed my style in a direction that I didn't expect, but I knew it was something that needed to be explored more. But it still left me thinking that I could fold a better samurai.”

He decided to redo the figure in the fall of 2020. "I started by redesigning each of the prior samurai's features one at a time. I ultimately redesigned every component, and I was always coming up with new methods to give the character more nuance. He began with a 95-centimetre (37.4-inch) square piece of Wenzhou rice paper. Then, to get the sculpture ready to come together, he pre-creased the material. 

According to his Instagram explanation, "the pre-creased paper has [a] vast quantity of folds, and even after folding those, there is still a lot of labour before it is finished." The development of each component during the folding process is visible.

The pre-crease of the paper took only a few days, then Könkkölä spent about a month completing and sculpting the figure. In later images, Könkkölä describes how the samurai gradually began to unite. The three-dimensional structure was eventually huge enough to stand on its own with the help of binder clips and folds that begin large and get smaller over time.

The entire samurai project, from planning to implementation, took three months. Actually, before folding the last character, Könkkölä folded the first four times.