6 inspiring paper artists

How people interact with physical designs is a big area of interest to me, when studying product design it was relatively easy to see how to consider this with actual physical products, but in my graphic design work it's a harder matter as you are mainly dealing with simple 2D materials (posters, flyers etc). Because of this I became interested in pop-ups, and through researching these realised that the world of making 3d forms from paper was a lot wider and exciting than i first thought.

Pop-ups, origami, kirigami, paper architecture, paper illustration, Mon-kiri, scherenschnitte, paper art...there is no one term that can cover the variety of facets in this field. Below I've compiled a very short list of some of the most inspiring artists/craftmens in this field. Hope you like it!

Eric Joisel
Amazing paper sculptures that almost look like they've been carved from stone. The root of Joinsel's work lies in origami, and the "Creating Process" section on his website shows how complex the folding pattern are. Amazingly most of his figures are created from single sheets of paper.









Jen Stark
Instead of folding, Jen Stark's paper art uses a technique of cutting through stacks of coloured paper to produce sculptures reminiscent of wormholes and fractal patterns.









Peter Callesen
A combination of paper folding and cutting (origami and kirigami) give Peter Callesen's works a feeing of delicate fragility. He uses the basic white A4 sheet to produce the majority of his creations.








Rob Ryan
Rob Ryan's impossibly intricate paper cuts contrast romantic images with the darker sentiment of the words carved within them.











Ingrid Siliakus
Taking inspiration from the founder of this particular type of paper art Masahiro Chatani, Ingrid Siliakus uses the complex art of cutting and folding to create precise architectural forms. Unlike origami where several sheets of paper can be used in paper architecture the intricate models are made from just one sheet of paper so cuts have to be carefully calculated.










Yulia Brodskaya
A graphic designer, Yulia has developed a unique style using cut and curled paper to make colourful, flowing typographic illustrations.