Finnish origami artist Juha Könkkölä is gaining popularity among paper art and origami enthusiasts with his impressively complex, life-like, origami works. Yet it’s not only the incredible complexity and expressiveness Könkkölä manages to portray with his paper figurines but the fact that each and every piece is folded out of a single sheet of paper.
Könkkölä’s most extreme piece of work “Duelling Knights” required 5,377 folds on a piece of paper over a period of two and a half years
The 24-year-young creative has managed to gather over 15 years of experience in folding origami, with a focus on creating expressive human characters. Gathering inspiration from history, folk tales, mythologies, books, movies, video games, and real-life observations, Könkkölä’s work includes Samurai with detailed armor, knights with shields, swordsmen, warriors in battle, and more.
The creation process of one artwork can take several months of work from the careful and thorough planning stage to the actual folding of thousands of folds on a piece of paper.
And while the final origami works are impressive enough on their own, it’s the laborious and strenuous process Könkkölä goes through to reach that, is what blows your mind. The creation process of one artwork can take several months of work from the careful and thorough planning stage to the actual folding of thousands of folds on a piece of paper. Könkkölä utilizes mathematics, traditional origami design patterns, and his own experiments to plan out and test the different ways in reaching a desired look and design, and when the plan is ready. He simply follows it fold by fold. But even after understanding the rigorous planning and testing period, each design requires, the fact that each of these extremely complicated and elaborate works is made from a single sheet of paper.
One of Könkkölä’s most impressive pieces of work, which caught the interest of the international press as well, is the piece titled “Duelling Knights”. The piece took the artist two and a half years to finish, 109 hours exactly and required the paper to be folded 5,377 times. “It was a huge accomplishment; it is the greatest work I have done so far”, the artist has said.
For more origami inspiration, follow Juho Könkkölä on Instagram.
