After building a few paper toys I decided to have a shot at designing one myself. I started doing sketches of various ideas and as I was doing them I decided I wanted a simple shape that I could easily modify for a series of models. Originally I was going to go for a "thinker" pose (i.e. sitting down, head resting on hand) and while some sketches seemed like they'd be simple enough I couldn't quite get it to be as simple as I'd like for my first model. So I put the idea at the back of my head and went back to the drawing board. At this point I found it hard to get the "thinker" idea out of my head and start fresh but after a while I managed and came up with a very simple shape that I decided to use. I made some quick sketches of some possible different types of models I could use and pick one to turn into a model first. I read around on how to go from a sketch to a paper model and decided I'd try Sketchup combined with Pepakura Designer and Open Office Draw. I made a model in Sketchup based on my drawing and mucked around with the dimensions until I liked the proportions and then put it into Pepakura Designer to make a basic template. From there I imported the vector graphic from Pepakura Designer into Open Office Draw to improve the template to closer resemble the original idea (the sticky out bits). I have yet to detail the model properly but I decided to do a test run and see if I like the model and get some feedback before I start to detail it, so here is my first papertoy at the beta phase (click to enlarge):

Please give me feedback and make suggestions.