Origami artist Alex Yu teaches how to fold a paper airplane that's also his personal logo, walking through crease placement, wing shaping, and throwing technique. He explains how folding affects brain activity and shares the mathematical and aerodynamic principles behind the design.
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OK, welcome everybody! I'm here with Alex Yu and Jason, and today we are going to learn how to make a paper airplane origami. Alex is an expert. This is what he's created. He's got some awesome designs that he's going to do another one later on, but the orange plane is my logo, and I met Alex at an event here in Toronto, and I said, "You gotta come and teach me how to do a paper airplane in origami." So this is what we're all here to learn, and hopefully we can pick it I have a bit of a sprained wrist from snowboarding, and Alex said as long as you can move your fingers, we can do this. So we'll see how it goes.
First of all, thank you for having me, Evan and Jason. I'm Alex. I'm a healer and origami artist. It's my passion to create things from paper. So I'm just here to share some teaching on how to create this plane.
Okay, here we go. So we all have a—
how big is this?
Like 10 inches?
8.5 inches.
8.5.
First of all, we have this square here. Fold it in half edge to edge into a rectangle. As you see, we just made a crease here. Rotate the paper so the crease is vertical. Fold it edge to edge again into a rectangle. Now bring your lower right corner, point it to this crease here. I have a question.
Is it halfway? Like where on this crease?
Um, like an inch from the edge kind of thing. Point it to it first and I'll show you later.
Okay, so like there?
Yes, and then looking at the top right corner, you want to make sure this corner is sharp.
Oh!
That's where you draw the line.
That's the aha moment right there. I'm thinking, "I'm touching it." Okay.
Oh, that's—
that's—
Precise, man.
I'm stressed out over getting my corner exact here.
No need to stress. As long as you follow your plan, which is your precreasing, you'll be fine. There we go.
I think we got it.
The corner is the reference point. That's how you know where to fold.
Once we got that, we open it. So repeat the same process on the left-hand side. So the lower left corner, raise it up and point it to the horizontal crease. Once you point it there, match up on the top left corner, making sure that it's sharp. This is probably the trickiest part of the entire plane. I kept it very clean and simple for design because the logo is very clean and very— gives a very free feel. So I try to keep the design clean.
Yeah, that's so good!
Origami is an art form combined with math. It's a very personal thing. So as you can see, we just made two intersecting creases.
Yeah.
And looking at the bottom part, I want you to fold this part up. This mark is where the crease crosses. Fold that part up. So the result would be these two creases would be matching up with the two, um—
These are like deep creases too, right? You're really pushing into it.
Yes.
I feel like my creases aren't—
Over the years, I read some article on how, how your fingers, your nerve endings, and by folding it with your nails, it's actually stimulating certain brain area to grow.
Oh, you fold with the nails? Yes!
Wow!
I missed that part.
So, uh, fold the lower right, uh, edge, matching up with this crease here. Fold it straight to that crease. It's what we call an angle bisector. We're dividing the angle into half.
Dividing this angle in half?
Yes.
And then you should have a straight point at the end there, right?
Yeah, straight point at the bottom.
Oh, the other side! Oh, I'm behind here, man!
Insider information!
It's not a race. It's not a race. On the right-hand side, this whole flap, just fold it to the center. Flip it over.
This is a good-looking plane so far, eh?
It's very clean.
Yeah, it's nice. I like it.
Fold the whole thing in half like you're closing a book, as I always tell my students.
So do you do classes?
I do. I teach at, um, well, I used to teach at libraries, birthday parties, weddings. This weekend I'm teaching at the Market Village Mall in Markham for Chinese New Year. Oh cool! That's pretty cool.
Yeah! It's the year of the what?
Horse. Can you do a horse? I can, just not from my head. Fair enough. So next part, fold this piece at a 1/3 angle. Well, hold on. I want to ask, is it More to one side or the other?
Um, oh, I see. Yeah, it's gonna have like a thin—
yeah, this is what forms the underside of the plane, so you're more like making like a W. Now we have a reference point. Yes.
Oh, is it— is that it? Are we done? This is it.
Um, we want to raise your wings a bit, uh, so you can rise.
Yeah, and grind.
My plane's gonna ride.
I would say 170-degree angle. Not 180. Uh, different scale of wing length versus the body will have different effects on the aerodynamics. Oh, I haven't quite figured out the exact detail yet, but it'll work.
Okay, so I have like a huge body on mine.
Yes.
You have like a slimline. Yes, slimline body.
It's not good.
Oh, yours is, yours is pretty big, man.
Yeah, mine is like—
yours is pretty big. Mine is like going from the back.
Mine's like a dart.
Like the instruction for holding the plane is hold it— see, this part is thicker, right? So you want to hold it around the thin part. When you throw, you want to tilt it at a slightly upper angle, not downward like this.
Okay.
And, uh, go ahead.
Alex is going to demo the proper way to throw. I'm not going to laugh. And then Jason and I are going to face off to see who made the better paper airplane.
I already laughed.
So, um, looking at the plane, holding at the back where it's thinner in paper, uh, just 2 fingers, and tilt it slightly upward when throwing. And here we go. That was pretty good.
That was pretty good.
That was nice.
That was pretty good.
On 3. Okay, 1, 2, 3. Oh snap!
I think mine went further. Mine went further. It totally went further, man. Now, Alex is gonna demonstrate how he makes one of his own designs, which is, what is it again?
A phoenix.
A phoenix. He's gonna make a phoenix. It was his own design, and he's gonna show us quickly how he does it. This is gonna take him about half an hour to do. We're gonna speed it up so you can see the whole process. Very cool, thank you, Alex. Where can people learn more about you?
You can visit my website at www.magicianofpaper.blogspot.com or look for me on Facebook, Folding with Yu, my last name Y-U-E, on Facebook. You can see my work and various events. So thanks for watching. If you guys like this video, please give it a thumbs up below.
Let me know what you think about the video in the comment section. Now, we sped up Alex going through making this phoenix. While we were going through that, there was a lot of interesting conversation. There's me singing in Chinese. There's a whole bunch of fun stuff happening. If you want to hear the whole thing unedited, it's about 20 minutes. Let me know in the comments. If we get enough comments, we'll post the unedited version, even though it's kind of embarrassing. So, uh, thank you guys. If you want to see more videos like this, subscribe to the channel, and we'll see you soon.
