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Hello I'm Jiéyì, I am an artist, and I also teach art.
I like to make art a lot of different ways,
sometimes I dance, sometimes I work with technology,
and one material I really love working with is paper.
So today we're gonna be exploring some paper magic.
Maybe you've seen one of these before,
sometimes people call them cootie catchers,
or fortune tellers, but I think that today,
we're gonna call it a story maker, because it's a way
of making a choose your own adventure story.
There are done a couple of different ways.
With lots of different kinds of stories in them.
But, we can think about a way to make it
that has different parts of a story.
So the parts that I'm thinking of, are like,
one really big part of a story is character.
Another big part of a story is the setting,
or where the story takes place.
And another big part of the story, is like,
what actually happens, what the plot is.
So maybe we can have a part of it that shows,
who's the main character in the story,
where does the story take place, and what happens.
When we are making our fortune teller, or our story maker,
we need a square piece of paper.
But it's okay if you don't start with a square piece
of paper, you can start with a rectangle.
It's okay if you use, a blank piece of paper like this,
or notebook paper, or even cut off a piece of a paper bag.
I'm gonna use some paper
that is a little bit bigger than regular notebook paper,
that way it's a little bit easier to see on camera.
So I have a piece of paper that's like this, and so,
to make our square, what I'm gonna do is,
fold this so that this side, touches this side.
So we have, this going to our adjacent side.
And when I'm making a fold like this,
I like the fold to be, pretty crisp usually.
And so, I'm gonna use the back side
of this colored pencil to make my fold a little bit crisper.
If we cut right along here,
then we'll have a perfect square.
So I'm gonna go ahead and fold this part up too,
just so we know with our fold, exactly where we want to cut.
And it looks like this.
So, if you have scissors,
you can go ahead and cut right along here.
If you don't have scissors, that's also okay.
What you can do is, this crease, you can take it,
and you can fold it, back and forth a couple of times,
so the paper has a memory of where it needs to be cut.
So I'm gonna fold it again, the other way.
And back once more.
And then you can carefully, start right here,
and tear right along the crease that you made.
And now you have two pieces of paper,
and one of them is a square.
To make our fortune teller, what I do is,
I start by folding the paper in half.
And, in half again, the other way.
Then, I take each corner and fold it to the center.
Just going right to the center like this.
Again trying to get those creases nice and tight.
It's okay if your creases aren't perfect,
but you wanna make sure
that your pieces of paper don't overlap.
'Cause it's gonna be a lot harder to lift up your flaps,
if the paper overlaps.
Now that you've done this side,
flip it over to the other side,
and we do the same thing again,
where we're folding right to the center.
And this is what I have.
To make it in, from this flat shape
into the fortune teller shape,
I usually just fold it back and forth a couple of times.
And then what I wanna do is sort of push in, like this.
And then, you'll pull out the flaps.
And then you have your fortune teller.
You can lift up the flaps to see what's on the inside.
On this one, I started to draw out
what the different parts are.
So what we can see here is that in our fortune teller,
we have a part that I am calling the outside.
The outside part, is the part that we can see, so we have,
one, two, three, four sections on the outside.
Then we have a part that I call the middle.
So this is the part where you're going like this.
And sometimes in the middle, sometimes people will choose
to do a small triangle, or to do the big triangle.
So on here, I labeled it, 1a, and 1b.
And then on the other side it's 2a, and 2b.
And I labeled it this way, where it goes, one, three,
two four, because I wanna know, that one is across from two,
and three is across from four.
So if it's this way, I can see three and four,
if it's this way, I can see one and two.
And then there's the last part,
and that's the part that I call inside.
So inside, is where you have your last scene.
So I have inside one, inside two,
inside three, and inside four.
So if I unfold this all the way,
we'll see that on the edges we have our one,
two, three, and four.
Our inside scenes are one, two, three and four.
And then we have our middle,
and our middle is kinda split in a funky way.
Where this is 2a, and this is 2b,
and these parts get squished together,
when you fold it like this.
Now we can think about
where we wanna put the different parts,
and what we wanna put inside of it.
So I have, this extra scrap of paper
from when I made my paper into a square.
And so on this paper,
I'm gonna start brainstorming some different ideas.
So I think that on the outside,
what I have right around here,
in this one I want it to be character.
So that's, who's the main character in the story?
So I'm gonna write, outside.
And then, we can think of a bunch of different ideas
for who this main character might be.
I love working with animals, both real and imagined.
So I'm gonna write, bird, alligator, fish,
monster, ghost, starfish,
dog, cat, human.
So those are some options, right?
Maybe one more, maybe two.
And then on the middle part, the part that we have
on the inside, we can think about the setting
or where this might take place.
So maybe we are on a boat in the ocean.
Or maybe we are in the mountains, or in a tree house,
or maybe we are in a regular house.
Or maybe we're in a forest,
or a volcano, or underwater,
or in outer space.
Maybe on a space station.
And then the next part you want to think about is
what's the action that takes place,
what's the plot, what happens in the story?
So, this is outside, middle, inside.
So inside, maybe we can have something like,
climbing into the sky.
Growing wings,
getting launched into outer space.
Playing soccer,
getting caught in a storm,
becoming a ghost.
So I have a bunch of different ideas, which is great.
'Cause now I can use some of those ideas
when I'm working on my story maker.
So I'm gonna put my ideas over here,
so that I can refer back to them.
I have one that I already started,
and I have two characters on it,
but I haven't done any of the other parts.
So I'm gonna start here, with character.
And when you are making your story maker,
you can use anything to color with if you want.
You can use, just a pencil, you can use markers,
you can use colored pencils.
And one of my favorite things
to work with, are water colors.
So, I already have a monster,
and a merperson, and I think next,
I wanna do another alligator kind of creature.
So I know that when this is folded this way,
that this is the direction that these go.
And so because I know this, I know that I need
to make my character standing up this way.
If I do it this way, it's gonna be upside down.
It can be helpful to write a note on a piece of paper,
so you know which direction things go.
That's part of the reason why I made this one.
That way, when I look at it, I know,
which direction this is.
So I wrote "outside 1",
and I know it's not gonna be this way, right,
'cause that's upside down!
So, for my next one, I'm gonna go ahead
and start on my character,
and I am doing my...
alligator creature.
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And my last character
is gonna be a... bird.
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So now I have all of my characters,
and I can start on the next part.
So I could do my setting, or I could do,
my plot or my action.
I need this to dry out just a little bit,
so I'm gonna work on my inside part first.
And if I look at this handy guide, then I'll know
that my inside parts need to be facing this way.
So for my inside part, let's see,
what are some different parts that could happen,
some different actions?
I think that I want one
of them where the character is getting launched
into outer space.
So I'm going to make my rocket ship.
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and another thing that I think I want to happen,
is that there are clouds, and there is, like, a ladder
that falls down from the clouds.
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And in the next scene, I'm thinking that there's going
to be a big fire that happens.
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But I want something about the fire going out too,
so I'm gonna draw these sort of like,
waves of, like, water or something on the side.
Or maybe it's wind,
so maybe the fire's actually just getting bigger.
And then in my last panel, I think I want to do one
about playing soccer.
So I'm going to draw a ball...
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accidentally going over a fence.
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There, so now, I have my inside, and I have my outside.
And I think I need to wait a minute for this to dry.
I think that this is, almost dry enough, we'll go for it.
We might get a little, a few splotches but that's okay.
So on the inside of this one, I think that,
this is where we're gonna put our setting.
So, with this one, I'm gonna have one
where it takes place in the forest.
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Another one that takes place in the ocean,
but on top of the water.
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Maybe there's a boat in the ocean.
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Probably not a very good place to live, hunh?
And then the next one, we're gonna have it be,
at the bottom of the ocean.
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so these are my four scenes.
So on here we have our four characters, we have our monster,
and our merperson, and our alligator, and our bird.
So who do you want to choose to be your main character?
You can choose that, and now, tell me when to stop.
All right, we're gonna be in the forest, and then,
in the forest, what's happening is
that there is a soccer ball that goes over the fence.
I wonder what that story is about?
Thank you so much for playing with me today.
There are so many different options for making your own,
choose-your-own-adventure story-maker.
I would love to see what you come up with.
My name is Jieyi, and I am an artist,
and I love working with paper.
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