Sunday, October 12, 2008

Memory Lane

I'm afraid I didn't really make any progress on my newest project, because I've been busy with other stuff...

I found myself pondering the years past, fun times and not so fun times, amongst the fun times of course was the moment when I first discovered papercraft on the world wide web!

We had just got our first computer and internet, because even back then, you couldn't really do without anymore for school assignments. Of course I also used it to look up any Star Trek and Star Wars website I could find. ;o)

And that was when I found my first paper models of R2-D2, an Imperial Star Destroyer and several starships and even some Japanese sites I didn't understand, but the models looked mighty cute.

Back then, papercraft wasn't very well known yet, but there already were a lot of papercraft websites with all kinds of models. I always wanted to make my own model, but I just didn't know how. I had never heard of Pepakura Designer and didn't have a clue how to make one using simple graphics software.

But then I got a flatbed scanner (for school again ;o) and I figured I could just draw the parts by hand, colour them with magic markers, and then scan them to the computer!

So that's what I did. I chose the Samurai Pizza Cats pizza parlour headquarters to be the very first paper model I would make myself, because it didn't exist yet, and I was a big fan of the show. To share it with all the other people like they had done with their models, I signed up at Lycos and made my very first homepage. It's gone now, but I tracked back an archived version from October 16, 2002: Ninjatoes papercraft website version 1

After that, I made several paper Star Trek ships that didn't exist yet and it must have been somewhere early in 2003 when I "revamped" my website, because I was having a lot of trouble with Lycos and its limitations: Ninjatoes version 2 and a later capture.

Version 3 is basically what you see now at http://members.home.nl/saarloos/ although over the years, I added a few new models every now and then of course. ;o)

It's been a very fun hobby for me, and I hope it is for all of you as well!!

2 comments:

  1. You've come a long way my friend.

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  2. Yeah, it's been a while since I started papercrafting. I still like to do some models by hand from time to time, although I also really like how some of the older video game models I made with Pepakura look like they came walking straight out of the screen!

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