PAWTUCKET — First he folded. Then he pinched. The next thing Ben Coleman knew, he invented something: origami bonsai.

“People know what origami is,” the 45-year-old Pawtucket man said. “People know what bonsai is. But when you combine the two, they don’t realize it’s those two words, little trees made from paper.”

Coleman, who began origami as a hobby decades ago, is now pursuing origami as a career. He has two books on the art being published this year. A traditional print book is due in November. An electronic book, Advanced Origami Bonsai (benagami.com), went online this month.

“Learning origami was difficult because books are two-dimensional and origami is three-dimensional. Now we have the Internet.”

Show-and-tell instructions are just a click away. And apparently, people are clicking. Coleman reports he’s now supporting himself on sales from his e-book, most of which are coming from overseas.

“It tells me there are a lot of Japanese guys folding paper.”

Origami, a centuries-old art, is a Japanese word combining two words, oru, which means folding, and kami, which means paper. Practitioners take one piece of paper and turn it into birds, flowers, just about anything by merely folding it, and not using scissors or glue.

“That’s for lazy people who can’t figure out another way.”

Coleman regards origami not just as art, but also as therapy, which he attributes to lifting himself out of longstanding depression, which we’ll get to in a moment. First, there’s Coleman’s new twist to an old art: origami bonsai.

“Once you make a flower, there’s nothing you can do with it. We origami people were going nuts trying to figure out ways to display our stuff. Just having it sit there is kind of lame.”

Coleman thought to put origami flowers on branches, an idea he includes in his book to be published in the fall, and that idea caused him some distress.

“I had these nightmares of it becoming popular in places like New York City and having Central Park stripped of tree branches and all this bad press coming out.”

So Coleman had to come up with a solution to that potential problem. And after losing his job at a propane company last spring, Coleman developed the idea of branches made of rolled up newspapers, treated with a solution, set to dry and painted.

“No one had the time, the unemployment, I’ve had to develop this.”

People seem to appreciate the execution of the concept. Coleman created 46 origami bonsai works for WRNI radio’s recent five-day fundraiser. Coleman’s works sold for $75, and sold out in three hours.

“Ben’s art is fabulous,” said Joe O’Connor, WRNI’s general manager. “The quality is there.”

The station is independent and local, O’Connor said, and likes to support artists who are.

The public’s support of origami bonsai came as a pleasant surprise for Coleman who at age 9 began practicing origami in his family’s East Side home in Providence, after his father received an origami book for Christmas.

“When he put the book down, I picked it up. It just completely captivated me.”

Coleman’s captivation ended in college, Northeastern in Boston, where he was an engineering major and attended three years of a five-year program.

“I dropped out because I was making so much money in computers.”

For 22 years Coleman owned a small chain of computer stores in Massachusetts, which he eventually sold. During that time, he only dabbled in origami, making a few Christmas tree ornaments a year.

“Those were the antacid years.”

They were also the years in which Coleman consumed two pots of coffee a day and smoked two packs of cigarettes a day. He went back to school and became a math teacher, which he did for two years

In 2006, Coleman’s sister gave him an origami book for Christmas, and it reawakened his interest in the art. He folded a flower from the book and couldn’t stop folding, straying beyond the directions and discovering a flower that appeared more than representational.

“If you stuck it on a bush, you’d think it was a flower from that bush. It sent my life in a completely different direction.”

Coleman developed what he calls a “silk technique” in which he applies a solution to his paper that gives his origami creations a sheen. And as Coleman indulged himself in origami, which he regards as not only creative but calming, he found himself feeling better, no longer affected by the depression he experienced recurrently since he was a teenager, and no longer feeling a need to take medications.

“Origami is art therapy, but I’m not a psychiatrist and nobody should go off their medications just because they start folding paper.”

Coleman is now thinking about branching out with the principles with which he creates his origami bonsai. When the rolled newspapers dry and set, he says they’re strong enough to use for basket weaving. And they’re also biodegradable and can be used to replace the non-biodegradable plastic casings for ballpoint pens.

“I don’t think there’s any application that is out of the question. I’ve developed a basic design for a car.”

Coleman pauses.

“I’m not sure it would work: moisture.”

brourke@projo.com