Martin Hunt’s Star Wars Origami

This is a guest post by Martin Hunt of starwarigami.co.uk.  You can more examples of his work on his website or on his Flickr page.

My name is Martin Hunt, I’m 32 years old, and I design and fold my own original Star Wars origami designs

As a child, my only exposure to origami were the playground folds that everyone learns at school – the flapping bird, the fortune teller, the paper boat – great fun for kids, but that was all.

It wasn’t until I was at university that I opened up the doors to the amazing number of possibilities that were out there to completely transform a humble piece of paper. I picked up a book of origami as a cheap way to pass the time between lectures, and jumped straight in with the most advanced book I could find in the shop at the time – Robert Lang’s Complete Book of Origami.

I struggled with some of the models at first, having dived straight in at the deep end, but my Maths degree stood me in good stead and I quickly picked up a rudimentary understanding of the techniques involved. After breezing through several more of Lang‘s books and most of John Montroll‘s back catalogue, my thoughts turned to designing a few model’s of my own.

It was around the same time of the theatrical release of The Phantom Menace, so my mind, like many others round the world was filled with all things Star Wars. It was only natural then, that my first foray into origami design would also follow suit. The resulting model, an X-Wing folded from the traditional frog base, was nothing special, and it would be a ship I revisited time and time again, but it set me on a path that leads all the way to the present day.

For a few years, I came up with new models on a regular basis – the Millennium Falcon was the first of the current generation of models to see the light of day, quickly followed by the Star Destroyer, which was born from a bus ticket during a particularly long traffic jam! But by 2004, with my student years a distant memory, real life was beginning to take hold. A new job, a new city, a mortgage, marriage, and a brief flirtation with cancer, all conspired to put my dream of publishing a book of my own origami design on hold, indefinitely…

…until, at the end of 2011, a spur of the moment decision to attend a meeting of the British Origami Society, wound up with me agreeing to fold some large scale version of my designs for display at the London MCM Expo. The positive feedback I received at this event rekindled my passion, and I resolved to go all out to make that dream a reality. I set up facebook and twitter accounts to gauge the public interest, and a new improved website followed in short order.

Obviously, with the long-awaited release of Chris Alexander‘s Star Wars Origami book, I’ve been beaten to the punch. But I sincerely believe there is room on the market for a more detailed and grown-up approach to the material to also be a success, and with enough support, I’m sure I’ll be able to convince Lucasfilm to give me the chance to prove it!