Product Description

Origami (paper folding) is the traditional Japanese pastime which is enjoyed all over the world today. Kunihiko Kasahara is considered one of the best origami artists worldwide and lectures in many countries. In this book he shows, not only traditional Japanese origami, but also presents his latest "cube art" where art is drawn on the outside of the origami cube. He explains how to make amazing units, beautiful boxes which look like flowers, snow crystals and more. The book is packaged with a CD ROM providing movies showing how to fold hundreds of projects. This book is great for the beginning and the more experiences origami enthusiast.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #74590 in Books
• Published on: 2005-10-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 136 pages

About the Author
Modern origami pioneer Kunihiko Kasahara was born in Okaya City, Nagano, Japan in 1941. He studied broadcasting at Nihon University's College of Art, where his interest in origami began. Over the years, he developed new techniques in origami art and wrote about them in several books, which have been translated into English, German and Korean. His first publication, Origami Book for Mother and Child (Seiko-sha), was displayed at the Japanese pavilion of the Osaka Expo in 1970, and was later packed into a time capsule that will be sealed for 5,000 years.

Customer Reviews

DOES WHAT IT PROMISES
The author delivers a stunning collection of models, traditional mixed with modern. There is also an account of re-creating forgotten Japanese models and an appreciation of recently rediscovered German models.

The book is written using the international origami symbol system, so no problems following the diagrams.

Model difficulty level ranges from simple to intermediate. This is real origami, no strings, cuts, wires or glue required.

It's relatively cheap too!

Illustrations are too hard to follow
I find the book full of promising designs and fun to look at but in practice trying to fold from the illustrations given, especially on the latter advanced designs, was particularly difficult. Sometimes forcing the end result as an approximation on the actual design, rather than the intended design to be met. A lot of it can be guess work and pure determination (which I suspect is what Origami is) but that's surely not the aim of the book.


I have some good results from the book and have been through it thoroughly, I can recommend the Cube Art Origami, which this book touches on, highly but must warn its difficulty is the problem with the book. I think the book could have been twice as long if it made more of an effort to show all the illustrations in a step-by-step guide to completion of each model.

Disappointing.
I was very disappointed by this book. It offers a good insight into the world of origami and is well presented and nicely illustrated. But theres not enough variety in the models you get to make.

The most disappointing thing about this book is that there are many pictures of interesting models that are not in the book. Such as the crane, which is a CLASSIC origami piece (and one which I really wanted to make!).

The majority of the book contains instructions for pinwheel designs and box variants. There are a few 3D models (knight on horse being the most interesting), as well as some flat designs.

Overall, having gone through the book, I have found nothing that I would really want to make. I give a 1 star purely for the nice presentation but cannot recommend this at all.