Origami Swan Project

Origami Swan Project instructions and tutorial

This stunning origami swan looks so alive that it would not be surprising to see it duck his neck and head underwater to catch a fish! Yet this paper swan is one of the most simple origami models, with only a few easy folds that anyone can make, even kids and origami beginners. In this video tutorial, origami artist Eric Vigier (also known as Madfolder) show us how to give life to an origami swan in a few easy curved folds, to turn a very simple origami model into a unique work of art. It takes less than 5 minutes to make this cool origami swan, and you only need one square of white copy paper. You can cut a square from a sheet of standard printer paper (letter size or A4 size is perfect), this is what Eric Vigier is using in this video. You can also make smaller swans (the young swans are called swanlings) to make a swan family.

All the folds of this origami swan models are simple folds, this is not a complex origami model, and you do not need special techniques like wet-folding to shape your swan. The swan in the cover of this video is the swan that Eric folded in a few minutes in this video.

Eric is folding a variant of the traditional origami swan model, with a thinner neck so that it's easier to round the neck and to give it some volume. If you are familiar with the traditional swan (one of the first models most folders learn, as it's very simple but very elegant, the traditional origami swan is one of my first video tutorials), the difference is that you need to first fold the neck down instead of up, as if the swan had its neck underwater. Then you thin the neck by folding the two sides of the neck in two, then you put the bottom of those folds inside the body of the swan, and you can open the neck folds to reverse the neck and put it upwards. Then close the neck again, and your swan now has a thin neck.

I apologize for the bad sound in the video. Not only do I have my usual heavy French accent, but I did not have a separate microphone for Eric, so there is unfortunately a lot of noise. I added English subtitles for the video, so please turn on subtitles so that you can both read and hear Eric's explanations.

Please share this Living Swan with your friends!

How to make an origami Swan Project

Here are the step-by-step instructions to fold a Living Swan (photo diagram and/or video).

• Origami Swan Project
• Projet Cygne en origami

Eric Vigier is a great French origami artist, and he also has his own YouTube channel where you can see some of his fabulous models, and where Eric demonstrate origami techniques like how to make sandwich paper, how to use MC etc.

You can also see many more of his awesome origami works on his web site Eric Vigier, créateur de plis.

Eric and I would like to invite you to participate in the Origami Swan Project: find a piece of paper, and fold some swans and shape them to give them life and to make them unique. Then take some pictures of your swan, and share them on social media with the hashtag #OrigamiSwanProject (Flickr, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, YouTube etc.). And please also e-mail them to stephane@origami.plus to make sure that we see them. It would be great if you can also tell us in which city and/or country you live, so that we can also create a map of all your lifelike origami swans, especially if you take pictures of your swans outside, for instead near a pond or river, in a garden or a park.

Your pictures will be added to the Origami Swan Project gallery.

And we will make a video that show all the origami swans from all over the world.

We hope that you will like this video and fold a lot of living origami swans!

Thanks a lot to Eric Vigier for accepting to make this video and to show us that all of us can be artists! :-)

Your origami Swan Project photos

If you fold this Living Swan, please send me pictures of your paper Swan Project so that I can show them here.

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  Origami swans couple and swanling