It's never a bad idea to set aside smartphones, tablets, and computers in order to focus on more hands-on projects. A few years ago we recommended a group of sites full of papercraft templates for free, and today we want to continue that line with PaperCraftSquare, a portal with more than 3,400 pages full of models ready to download, print, and cut, for free.
Personally, papercraft reminds me of those dreadful school exercises where I had to make cubes and pyramids from paper and cardboard, but I admit some designs are truly fabulous. Moreover, papercraft is a hobby, not a chore. There is much to learn without pressure or deadlines, and plenty of room to experiment.
So, where would you like to start? Military vehicles? Airplanes? Comic and anime characters? Animals? Basic origami? It doesn't matter if you're a beginner or looking for a bigger challenge; the web is full of free papercraft templates and one of the main sources is the PaperCraftSquare portal.
Download Free Papercraft Templates
Unlike other sites, PaperCraftSquare works as a kind of index. That means that when you download a papercraft template, the link will send you to a different page where it is available, whether it's the original creator or a mirror. Broken links are definitely a possibility, but we have had good results during our tests.
Each entry has a brief description, which is notable considering that PaperCraftSquare has more than 3,400 pages. The main categories are "Robots/Mecha", "Anime", "Airplanes", "Military", "Vehicles", and "Origami" although there is a lot of overlap between them. As expected, the site offers a great deal of material dedicated to franchises like Star Wars, Marvel movies, Pokémon, the Gundam universe and several high-profile video games.
Beyond the content, I must admit that the experience within PaperCraftSquare is not perfect. The interface is a bit awkward, and at the time of writing, its internal search engine presents a 500 error. I imagine it's something temporary, but you'll have to navigate by instinct and one click at a time until it's fixed. Even so, PaperCraftSquare is a stop that any casual fan or advanced papercraft enthusiast needs to make.
Official site: Click here
