Hello everyone, it's my first post on this forum and I'm very excited to be a part of this community. I'm interested in origami for a few solid years, basically 5 years in total, but only 4 of actual creating experience. Not much, but surely quite a lot of time as well. As my thread states, I'm a big fan of anime and Japanese culture in general. I just love animes and watched tons of them, same with Japanese culture - from their music to food, although I have never had a chance to visit Japan yet, I hope I will be granted such opportuntity someday.

Apart from work, unfortunately no university anymore :(, I watch a lot of anime, I love cycling and well.. a little bit of fitness as well, although I don't actually frequently attend gym - I just work out in home a little bit, doing some simple exercies - it really helps you get on with day-to-day activities and is a great way to free your mind, even better than origami in terms of resting after a hard day, where work has literally exhausted you. I actually prefer to focus on origami on weekends only as I simply feel too much tired after work in the evening, I rather either work out a little bit or just watch some anime, meet with my friends etc. It's pretty hard to stay motivated in the evening and dedicated enough to keep using your brain to create something>

I'm very excited that I was able to find this community, which even though is pretty small for this particular moment, we can see that it's growing pretty quick and there is already lots of relevant content out there. I'm sure I will make a great fit and I hope to be of an assistance for as many beginners as I can and I promise to be a good listener and keep applying advices from more advanced users

Origami surely isn't an easy hobby, but things that are hard are also usually those, that bring us biggest joy and satisfaction from our work. Even though I consider myself to be highly motivated and dedicated person, I very often struggle with getting myself back to 'work'. Like once something I was working on is actually pretty bad, I tend to lose my motivation totally and can't get myself to start creating anything else. I'm trying to fight this trait of mine, but it's so-so for now. I'm making progress with my keeping my attitude in reins, but well, seems like the best solutions for me at the moment is just to be successful.

Anyway, I'm really glad to be here and I hope I will be a great aid to this community and positively affect its development

Thanks for your suggestions guys. It's true, I may be overthinking this a little bit too much. After all, I will probably never reach the level I would love to, doesn't matter how much I will keep practicing, so I should just keep it more simply and just enjoy the work I do. I actually think that I will take a break from creating anime characters or any other characters for this matter. There is already tons of many other advanced projects, that I could take advantage of and there is many tutorials around the web for them. For example, I found a pretty solid for really great looking roses. As long as making mere roses isn't that hard, to make them as detailed as those is tons of work and requires a lot of skills, so I will focus on something else for now. I would love to keep this thread alive though and I hope it will be so, as in few months I can get myself up to creating another anime character and I hope others will show some of their work regarding characters as well as share some tips along the way. Though, it's all true what you said - it's an art, and arts are far from being perfect. I do realize that, just I want to create something that I will personally like, then I will gladly keep it. Otherwise, I just can't. I want to focus only on having the collection of stuff that I really look upon with kind of admiration and I can get satisfaction from. For now, with figures I have created it most certainly wasn't the case. So, yeah, keeping my expectations lower would be a smart thing to do, just I'm not sure if I will be able to do that. We will see, but for now I'm swaying from creating characters and I will focus on something to successfuly improve my skills, and get back to characters..., well, god knows when. Probably when I feel like I'm up to the task again.

Thanks for kind words and suggestions towards my attitude - I'm sure it has been playing a big part in my recent performance and I promise to improve in this aspect.

Hello, I'm pretty new to this forum. I have earlier made my introduction in a suitable section, so I won't focus too much on myself this time, but just wanted to say that I'm very happy that a forum like this exists. There is a couple pretty big origami forums, but frankly, I just couldn't fit there.

The atmosphere kind of made feel like I didn't belong there. Anyway, I'm into origami for a couple of years now - 4 to be exact and I have always loved both the art of creating something as well as anime. I'm a big anime lover, I have over 4 months spent according to MyAnimeList, which surely puts me in a top 5% or so on the website. I watch everything, from shounens (not much anymore now) to dramas and horrors.
The point is, that I'm just extremely addicted to anime and Japanese culture and as we know, they are great in drawing (mangas), creating origamis and all other manual stuff. We surely saw some arts of Japanese or Chinese artists and they are really amazing, something that is extremely hard to replicate and probably cannot ever be learnt - pure talent, so I call it.

So, being heavily addicted to Japanese culture and origami, I really got into creating figures of my favorite characters - and well, not only humans, but dragons, monster, anything basically. Just it's extremely hard to do, I had a couple of tries from the not too big amount of tutorials I have found over the internet and a few Japanese books, but I was hardly successful. I know, that you can't address any general tips here, it's not an easy thing to do after all, it's totally advanced stuff, at least in order to make the figure look as real as possible, but I thought I could make this thread for all other anime lovers, that would like to apply this love to origami as well and create some characters.

Don't have to be anime characters, I would say any movies or tv shows characters would work too, just I feel like anime figures are much more characteristic and thus much easier to build than real humans we see at movies, unless they are dressed in some kind of costume or something, that makes them look totally unique and different, kind of like J. Depp in Pirates of Carribbean. By the way, Star Wars also seems like a great niche to do this and a movie Avatar by James Cameron, which I wanted to make a few origami characters off, but have failed unfortunately.

I know, that there is very little advice we can give to each other in terms on how to create a certain figure, as not only every figure is different, but also this niche is advanced enough, that it requires certain skills much more than knowledge itself. I guess, beginners shouldn't even start to try, although they are free to do that, but if not for thousands of origami-made simple projects, like chickens, flowers etc., I would never be able to even make a simple human in origami - or well, I probably could, but if you want to make it any more personalized and tweak it accordingly with your own liking, that's the whole other story. Just folding the paper to make simple head, legs and arms is fairly easy, but anything else, like covering it with a jacket, pants, highlighting some of its most distinguished visuals.

Well, this is on a whole other level and I still feel like I'm years from even being able to make it as my imaginations tells me to.

So far from the typical anime figures, I have made: Son Goku - classic, everyone, even those people that aren't really into should know how this character looks like. I got to admit, that I have been able to create one, but it was far below my expectations, so I have thrown it away. As a matter of fact, I have thrown away every single anime character I have created so far. Don't get me wrong, I love to save my work, but it needs to be properly done, I kind of don't see myself saving anything that I don't particularly like. I rather throw it away and keep trying and trying to finally get it done accordingly with my own liking. I have also created Princess Yona from Yona the Dawn (really good anime, and god, I literally love her). I have failed with her too, so thrown her away. Apart from that I also tried to build Luffy, Sasuke, Kagura (from Gintama) and Kuroko. All of them, despite me having spent really a lot of work on them and multiple efforts were are all below my expectations.

Of course, I tried to redo them, sometimes with a better success, but most likely with my efforts ending up in vain - the outcome of a second or third try was actually worse than the first one. Sometimes I also tend to destroy one during creating - it happened with Sasuke. Simply had my motivation kept pretty low and was already annoyed, that I cannot make anything right.

So, as you see. I'm far from being good at that and despite having quite a lot of experience in origami - I have done probably 3/4 of all tutorials found on the internet and in the books, from easy to semi-advanced ones. I used to think that they are advanced, but after trying to make anime characters, I started considering them semi-advanced top. Frankly, making characters is where your skills are really challenged.
Anyway, did you guys have any success with building anime or all other kind of characters, figures resembling humans or any cool figures actually? Sure, some stuff that I have mentioned earlier apart from humans, like dragons for example, are fairly easy to do, but once you want to do a really personalized dragon - like if you took it out from the anime, is I believe extremely hard. Hopefully there is many more anime fans like me!