The Origami Forum

hey, me again. I just got works of satoshi kaimia (the ultamate king ) and im all exited and stuff for bahamut. but i only have that crappy 15 x 15 cm paper. anyone know where I could get some 40 x 40 cm tissue foil (or really anything else that works) online in us$ thats kinda cheap??

btw saving up for a new computer. mine sucks.

Well, you can make your own quite easily, actually, to the tone of less than $.10 a sheet.
I'm actually working on two different guides at the moment, one for Tissue Foil and methylcellulose. If you wait a few days, I'll have those typed up.

Anna has a video of making tissue foil, if you want I'm sure she'd post a link here for you.

Here are two must have seen videos by Sara Adams.
One about making Tissue Foil: http://www.happyfolding.com/instructions-tissue_foil
And one about making Double Tissue paper: http://www.happyfolding.com/instructions-double_tissue

By the way, I haven't tried it myself, but I wonder how this could make a good paper for complex models...
I mean : tissue + glue + foil + glue + tissue... the result must be pretty thick, right ?

Actually no. They result is a pretty thin very good shape-able paper. You use a very tiny amount of glue, watered down approximately 1:1 and with a painter's roll only apply that much that the paper adheres to it. When I do so, my paper doesn't really get wet, a little moist at best. The tissue paper is amongst the thinnest papers you can get. The glue gives it some crispness and the foil makes it easy to shape.

Some tissue paper, large format aluminum foil (in the US I get it at so-called "dollar" stores as it's thinner than the higher cost foil), and some spray adhesive. Do your spraying outdoors. Least expensive medium I fold by a long, long shot.

The spray glue has many disadvantages though. Apart from sticking to everything around, it doesn't add any sizing to the paper whereas the white glue does. So the tissue foil made with spray glue is softer to the touch and has more foil properties than paper properties making it a hard to work with medium. An advantage of using spray glue however is that you can also use paper types that otherwise wouldn't be possible like for example embossed paper that would loose its shape when getting moist.

origami_8 wrote:The spray glue has many disadvantages though. Apart from sticking to everything around, it doesn't add any sizing to the paper whereas the white glue does.

But what's the point of size when you have the underlayment of aluminum foil? Stuff is already going to stay where you put it, and no matter what you do to the paper it will still have thickness (the thickness of the tissue foil is one of its chief disadvantages) and you will still have a hard time reversing creases, just like any foil? Don't mean to be antagonistic, I just don't see it.

By the way, white glue is mostly polyvinyl acetate, which has somewhat different properties than methyl cellulose.

In my experience creases are far easier to reverse on tissue foil made with white glue than with spray glue. The paper feels and behaves very different. The one with spray glue feels more like some layers of different material stuck together whereas the PVA one feels like one single sheet and has more paper like properties. Foil alone is horrible to fold and so is single untreated tissue paper. Bond with spray glue it is as if you had to deal with two untreated sheets of tissue paper and one layer of foil, I never liked it. The white glue tissue foil has completely different properties. Yes, the glue might add a tiny bit of thickness to it but it also bonds the layers together really well, adding sizing to the paper making it crisper and more easy to fold. I've never had problems reversing creases on this paper. In my opinion different words would be needed to distinguish between tissue foil made with different glues. Glue Stick is another possibility that is sometimes used. The paper made with it is more like the one made with spray glue and not really great for folding.
I encourage you to try out making those different papers and fold from them to see for yourself how extreme the differences are.
As far as I know MC doesn't stick to foil, but I can't remember having tried it myself.