Papercrafting

Posted by Adrienne Hunter on Oct 8, 2012 in Creative Inspiration | 0 comments

The art of sculpting and crafting with paper has blossomed in recent years. Up and coming artists are doing things with paper that are hard to imagine are even made of paper at times! The amount of artistry and talent and skill with their paper mediums means that a lot of tedious, time-consuming work goes into papercrafting, but the results are nothing short of beautiful.

We wanted to put out a small showcase of some of the best papercrafting out there, to show everyone what’s possible when you let your creative mind run wild with something as simple as a single sheet of paper!

Jen Stark creates enormous kaleidoscopic sculptures from multiple layers of colored paper. She cuts through the white exterior to reveal the beautiful color spectrum of layers beneath.

 

This backlit landscape paper sculpture was made from a single sheet of paper! The artist created this piece to be part of a series of famous haunted houses and horror movie locations, just in time for Halloween. See more of the spooky gallery here.

 

 

Papercraft trees made from McDonald’s bags during the 2012 Olympics, see more shots of this work here!

 

 

Quilling paper is the art of taking strips of paper and rolling them into tightly curled shapes. This bright and colorful quilled piece is from a series of physical anatomy paperscraft sculptures by Lisa Nilsson:

 

 

Paper sculpture can also come in the form of paper folding. This geometric design creates 3D visual elements of depth, a lot like fractals. Made by paper artist Matthew Shlian, check out more of his work.

 

 

Sometimes paper sculpting can take on a more literal meaning: these books were carved into a landscape, letting soft light come in from overhead to create a very moody papercraft. If we cropped out the obvious signs that this was made from hardbound books, we wouldn’t be able to tell that this wasn’t a cave somewhere deep in an arid, dry region. More of Guy Laramee’s work can be found here.

 

 

Or in this case, the term “sculpture” isn’t even accurate! These papercraft black moths were constructed and scattered throughout the entire interior of an art gallery to create a larger than life presence of thousands of winged insects:

 

 

And last but not least, the first thing that typically springs to mind when we talk about paper art is origami. If it’s foldable, someone somewhere has made origami out of it! These apples are made out of paper currency outside of the U.S. by Won Park, see more of his creations here.

 

We hope you have been inspired by this collection to make your own papercraft designs!