Flattable Papercut Light

Hello again! 2022 is coming to an end. If you are looking for a unique lamp for your holidays home decoration, then this instructable is for you :D

The bright side of this papercut light:

• flattable, easy to store when not in use and easy to send as a gift
• doesn't need too much materials
• you can even made this with your PowerPoint and Excel
• you can use this decorative lamp in any occasion by changing the decorative papercut scenery inside the sliceform

The challenging side of this papercut light: you'll need a lot of patient :D

In this instructable I am going to show you how I made my Flattable Papercut Light.

Supplies

In this project, I used:

• Microsoft Excel
• CorelDraw (you can use PowerPoint or Silhouette Studio)
• Watercolor paper 200 gsm or thicker (I used 300 gsm)
• Printer (optional)
• Cutting pen (you can use a cutting machine)
• Cutting mat
• Round wooden LED base (or LED tumbler)

Step 1: Understanding Sliceform

A paper sliceform or lattice-style pop-up is a form of papercraft that uses two sets of parallel paper patches slotted together to make a foldable structure. The structure can be folded flat, as well as fully opened (popped-up) to make the two sets of patches orthogonal to each other. Sliceform also used in some furniture design like chair, table, and lampshade. There is a book by Masahiro Chatani and Keiko Nakazawa called Pop-Up Geometric Origami for anyone interested in knowing more about sliceforms.

To make a sliceform, you can use a 3D software like SketchUp, Rhino, or Slicer for Fusion 360 (click the links to watch tutorials). Unfortunately Autodesk has stoped maintaining the Slicer for Fusion 360 and I don't know if there is a substitute or not (if you know an alternative for this tool please comment bellow). But not everybody have a basic knowledge of 3D modelling, so let's try another way.

indivisibl has wrote the Geometric Chrismas Ornament That Folds Flat, explaining the making of sphere sliceform with calculation so that we won't need a 3D software. But what we need for this light is a hollow sphere sliceform.

Step 2: The Trial of Hollow Sphere Sliceform

The difference between the basic sphere sliceform and the hollow sphere sliceform is in the hollow sphere sliceform there is a hollow inside the sliceform for the decorative purpose. To make this hollow-sphere, you need to choose the dimension of the sphere. After that, do some calculations using Ms Excel. You can get a better explanation in this video by Genie Craft (his calculation was based on MathBits). You can download the Excel file of the calculation based on the dimension that used in that video here (I added some notes and illustration to get a better understanding).

After working with some numbers and formulas in Excel, let's make the sphere rings. If you are going to use PowerPoint, you can watch Genie craft's video for the tutorial. I got a little problem here in using PowerPoint 2007 which is older than what Genie Craft used in his video. Thus I couldn't find the "Merge Shape", the main feature in this step. So I decided to make the sphere ring using CorelDraw, and I think you can use an alternative software like Inkscape.

If you are going to use Silhouette software, Papercrafts and other fun things already wrote the tutorial you can follow.

I already try the exact dimension that Genie craft used in the video. You can see the trial template of the hollow sphere bellow.

The paper I used for these trials was regular 70 gsm HVS, and assembling those rings to make the sliceform was crazily energy draining.

Step 3: My Hollow Sphere Sliceform

I decided to make a 20 cm diameter sphere sliceform. After some trials with different slot number and different slot distance, I noticed that in order to make the hollow sliceform we need to make sure that:

• the number of the slots and the slot distance won't exceed the diameter of the ring (especially the smallest sphere ring)
• the slot won't cut off the sphere ring

Based on that trial I also made some modofication (optional):

• the base of the sphere is a little bit flat so that it can stand on its own
• some sphere rings have inner and outer slot in a ring to get a better grip on another sphere ring

To display the decorative layers inside, the sliceform need to have an opening or a window by cutting some sphere rings into a C-form as you can see in the diagram picture.

Step 4: Decorative Layers

Determining the shape and size

I manually did some trial to determine the size of the decorative layers. I started from the the height of the sphere sliceform, if it still not fit inside, then I decreased the size by cutting the paper little by little until in fit perfectly inside the sphere sliceform (the shape would be an oval shape). Based on the size of my sliceform, I can insert 6 layers of decorative layers, and the size did change a little bit from one layer to another.

Designing the decorative layers.

I sketched this design using a pencil, but you can also customize your own design using an app such as Adobe Illustrator, CorelDraw, or Sketch. If you use those apps to design your shadow box, you can use another app to preview your design such as Paper Lightbox iOS on iPad Pro. Find further instructions to use this app here. Another designing method is using this Paper cut Lightbox generator by Vlad Karpov

Back to manual sketch, I drew the overall design, how the final look of this paper cut, then determining the layers of the paper. I wanted to make the paper cut into 6 layers of paper, so then I drew the design of each layer on the paper and added a 1 cm border on every side of each layer. It was based on the story of prophet Yunus (peace be upon him) when he got swallowed by a whale. Actually I have made a papercut lightbox using this theme several years ago, but I really want to remake it. I also wrote an instructables of AVATAR papercut light.

This sliceform really makes changing the decorative layers very easy. I thought that I really need to try to change the decorative layer for other occasions :D

Step 5: Cutting

Since I didn't want to print the design directly on the watercolor paper, so I did a hack. First I printed my sphere rings on a regular HVS paper, then I placed the HVS paper on the 300 gsm watercolor paper and cliped them together. I always start the cutting from the smallest part, that was the slots. I cut all the pieces using a cutting pen. Cutting 300 gsm watercolor paper really need a lot of patient.

Step 6: Assembling

Start the assembly from the center ring, and then moving in descending order. After all those HVS trials, assembling the 300 gsm paper was really satisfying.

For the decorative layers inside the sphere, start from the back layer. Insert the bottom slot of the layer to the bottom cross section of the sphere, and top slot of the layer to the top cross section of the sphere.

Step 7: Final

Put the papercut sliceform on a round LED base and admire your work! I really think that changing the decorative layers for other occasions is worth to try, since it's very simple and easy.

Some thoughts

The first time I made a papercut lightbox was in 2017. At that time I was really fascinated. After that I really want to make more of this papercut lightbox and sell them, but I got a problem in finding the best 3D frame. Most of time the frame are aesily broken, and got the problem with shipping caused by glass material (some courier refused to ship glass frame), weight, and dimension (high shipping cost). Thus, I decided to make papercut lighboxes only for myself, sometimes for instructables contest and I don't even put them in a 3D frame.

Later on I found this technique called Sliceform that mostly used in pop-up card. It was such a brilliant idea to make a pop-up frame for my papercut light and it is flattable (what a space saver!).

Thank you for reading this instructable to the end. If you have any question, please don't hesitate to write in the comment or contact me through my instagram @quinzyvarira (If you are interested in the physical product of this flattable papercut light you can DM me). I will also upload some footages of the process in my instagram account.

I would love it if you wanted to support my projects, please consider helping me to cover the cost of designing, documenting and sharing these projects on https://ko-fi.com/quinzyvarira.

See you in the next instructable! 😁