Paper toys are toys made of paper. They are constructed in several ways, by folding, as in paper airplanes,

paper fortune teller A fortune teller (also called a cootie catcher,.. chatterbox,. salt cellar, whirlybird, or paku-paku) is a form of origami used in children's games. Parts of the fortune teller are labelled with colors or numbers that serve as options for a playe ...

s or

Origami ) is the Japanese art of paper folding. In modern usage, the word "origami" is often used as an inclusive term for all folding practices, regardless of their culture of origin. The goal is to transform a flat square sheet of paper into a f ...

, or by cutting, decorating or assembling pieces of paper with glue or tape to create a

paper doll Paper dolls are figures cut out of paper or thin card, with separate clothes, also made of paper, that are usually held onto the dolls by paper folding tabs. They may be a figure of a person, animal or inanimate object. Paper dolls have been ine ...

paper model Paper models, also called card models or papercraft, are models constructed mainly from sheets of heavy paper, paperboard, card stock, or foam. Details This may be considered a broad category that contains origami and card modeling. Origami ...

History

Paper toys date back to

ancient times Ancient history is a time period from the beginning of writing and recorded human history to as far as late antiquity. The span of recorded history is roughly 5,000 years, beginning with the Sumerian cuneiform script. Ancient history cov ...

. The history of paper toys can be traced back to the art of

origami ) is the Japanese art of paper folding. In modern usage, the word "origami" is often used as an inclusive term for all folding practices, regardless of their culture of origin. The goal is to transform a flat square sheet of paper into a f ...

(or-i-GA-me).The word is based on the Japanese words ''Ori'', which means to fold, and ''Kami'', which means paper. However origami's roots are from

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's List of countries and dependencies by population, most populous country, with a Population of China, population exceeding 1.4 billion, slig ...

and it spread to

Japan Japan ( ja, 日本, or , and formally , ''Nihonkoku'') is an island country in East Asia. It is situated in the northwest Pacific Ocean, and is bordered on the west by the Sea of Japan, while extending from the Sea of Okhotsk in the n ...

somewhere around the sixth century. The craft was for only the rich at first because the cost of paper was very high. They found useful ways to use the folded paper. For example, they would fold it with strips of dried meat or fish and this was called Noshi, which was a token of good luck. Also they would often wrap the glasses of wine at a wedding into butterfly form to represent the bride and groom. As time went by new methods of making paper were developed which lowered the cost of paper. This allowed the art of origami to be more accessible to all people.

Paper doll Paper dolls are figures cut out of paper or thin card, with separate clothes, also made of paper, that are usually held onto the dolls by paper folding tabs. They may be a figure of a person, animal or inanimate object. Paper dolls have been ine ...

s have been popular toys throughout the last couple of centuries. Unlike the origami and modern paper toys these are usually flat 2d dolls. Often various paper clothes and such things are used to decorate the doll. Much alike the modern paper toys they would often print dolls that resemble popular celebrities, singers, and political figures. They also would print these dolls in magazines for children to cut out and color, they would have a page for the figures and then a page of all the costumes and add-ons.

Modern paper toys

Modern paper toys are made using

paper Paper is a thin sheet material produced by mechanically or chemically processing cellulose fibres derived from wood, rags, grasses or other vegetable sources in water, draining the water through fine mesh leaving the fibre evenly distribu ...

, tape or

glue Adhesive, also known as glue, cement, mucilage, or paste, is any non-metallic substance applied to one or both surfaces of two separate items that binds them together and resists their separation. The use of adhesives offers certain advant ...

scissors Scissors are hand-operated shearing tools. A pair of scissors consists of a pair of metal blades pivoted so that the sharpened edges slide against each other when the handles (bows) opposite to the pivot are closed. Scissors are used for cutt ...

and a printer. Most modern paper toys are digitally distributed patterns that are printed and cut to be folded into the desired shape. There are many websites and blogs where these downloads are available. There are a wide variety of blank templates that can be downloaded and customized as well. Most often the template will be created in a program such as

Adobe Illustrator Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to month ...

Adobe Photoshop Adobe Photoshop is a raster graphics editor developed and published by Adobe Inc. for Windows and macOS. It was originally created in 1988 by Thomas and John Knoll. Since then, the software has become the industry standard not only in rast ...

or Pepakura and then uploaded as a

.pdf Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. ...

, JPG or other image file type.

References

Art and craft toys {{Toy-stub

History

Modern paper toys

See also

References