The English Birdmodel designer you mean is Matthew Topp. He is no longer active (retired and in good health, glad to tell you), but his nine unsurpassed bird models are still on the market. I have met him several times since I started importing his models for the Dutch market. He is indeed an artist (used to teach at a London art college), and also had ample experience in the world of printing and graphic design. All this, and a 'bird watcher' as well. The models were designed in the '80ties. Did we have photocopying machines in those days?! Certainly not scanners and printers...
In these days of computer assisted design, designers regard a multi-curved surface as an accumulation of flat surfaces. They make use of software to break down such a shape into a large number of small, flat triangles. This results in very unnatural, angular shapes: clever, but certainly not very aesthetic. Older designers like Malcolm Topp took the possibilities (and limitations) of the material (paper) as a starting point, thinking in terms of curving rather than folding, and ended up with lovely results.
Of course this approach took time. As his wife Anita told me: 'When he was working on the osprey he came downstairs every night with a new white model of the head, announcing 'this is it'
for a month before he was satisfied with it'...
The pictures show the osprey (1/1 scale), ca. 6 ft wingspan. My first model was getting scruffy (but not discoloured, superb printing!) after nearly twenty years, so I wanted to build a new one. The picture shows my wife launching the old one - it came down very gracefully, and we repeated this several times to get good pictures.
And by the way: in ten years time I sold over 10,000 of these models in Holland only, via my internet shop
www.zeistbouwplaten.nl. Alas, I think the market has now been saturated... They have helped finance quite a few of my Zeist Bouwplaten / Paper Trade publications!