Ravensblight.com is a fun, well-conceived and executed concept website that takes as its central metaphor a haunted town. The MOST fun part for me at least was the “Toystore” which features a couple DOZEN creepy papercraft models to print out and build.
Papercraft for those not familiar with it is a craft somewhat similar to origami in that you start with a flat sheet of paper and you end up with a three-dimensional object. But since the “rules” of papercraft allow scissors and elaborately printed paper, the object are — to be blunt– WAY cooler than origami. The technique behind papercraft is a pretty cool mixture of high-tech and low-tech. High tech computer-aided-design tools are used to create 3-d models of things… in Ravensblight’s case, for instance, mechanical bats or the tiny coffins shown above. Then another program “unfolds” the object into a 2-d surface and saves it as a .pdf. From a crafter’s perspective, it’s all low-tech simple: all you have to do is download the .pdf’s, print them with a color printer ideally on stiff paper and assemble. It’s a great rainy day activity and heck it’s a blast to have a little line of coffins on your desk!