Artistic Duo Create The Most Elaborate Paper Wigs

Ukrainian-Russian art duo Asya Kozina and Dmitriy Kozin are taking paper craft to new heights with their elaborate and flamboyant wigs made entirely out of paper.

Inspired by Baroque and Rococo wigs, the talented couple and art duo create their own modern wigs out of pristine white paper. The unique choice of material only makes their creations stand out even more, so it’s no wonder that their amazing headgear has been getting a lot of attention both within the art world but also on social media. Looking at some of their most recent creations it’s really not that hard to see why people are so impressed with Asya and Dmitriy’s work – it’s really unlike anything you’ve ever seen before.

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Artist Creates Giant Realistic Flowers Out of Paper

Tiffanie Turner, a San Francisco based artist, is best known for her ability to craft incredibly realistic flowers out of paper. She cuts petals out of delicate Italian crepe paper and sews them together to resemble the creases and folds of flowers. When photographed, it’s nearly impossible to tell these fake flowers apart from real ones!

The faux florals that Turner creates vary in dimensions, right from palm-sized to nearly three ft. wide. Depending on the size, each flower can take anywhere between 35 to 80 hours to complete. Most of her pieces mimic healthy flowers, but at times she experiments with the wilted look as well.

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The Delicate Paper-Cutting Art of Hina Aoyama

You’ve probably seen intricate paper-cut art before, but Hina Aoyama takes it to a whole new level by achieving an incredible level of detailed using only scissors.

Unlike other artists who use fine tools like an X-acto knife to create elaborate pieces of paper-cut art, Japanese-born Hina Aoyama only uses a pair of scissors and lots of patience. The Paris-based artist takes anywhere from a few hours to several months to complete her lace-like fragile masterpieces, as she needs to keep a steady hand and arm herself with patience throughout the whole creative process. Looking at her works, I can’t help but wonder if Hina has some kind of magical powers that help her cut out such delicate marvels, but the videos she made of her carving tiny paper details prove she’s just a very talented artist.

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Susan Stockwell Makes Victorian Gowns from Paper Maps and Real Money

We’ve all seen paper dresses before, but Susan Stockwell’s Victorian gowns made from maps and various bills are in a class of their own. A sculptural study on colonialism and the British empire, her series of life-size paper dresses are composed of ordinance survey maps and English bills glued together. By sing military maps to create women’s dresses, Stockwell addresses issues like English colonization and occupation of Scotland over 300 years, and mail domination in Western history. Based on styles of dresses worn by English women explorers during the Victorian period, the artist honors their role in history.

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The Awe-Inspiring Paper Sculptures of Allen and Patty Eckman

Allen and Patty Eckman create detailed cast paper sculptures inspired by Native American culture, using a special technique they themselves invented.

Allen Eckman took an interest in art and design after returning from Vietnam, where he served as a Sargent. He attended the Art Center College of Design, where he met Patty, who obviously shared his passion for the arts. They married, had kids and managed an advertising company in the Los Angeles area for about 12 years, after which they decided they had had enough of their stressful careers and agreed it was time for a fresh start in something they were truly passionate about, art.

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Artist Makes Detailed Architectural Models from Paper

US-based artist Christina Lihan uses her experience as an architect to create detailed models of famous buildings and urban spaces, from paper.

Ms. Lihan received a Bachelor’s degree in architecture from the University of Virginia and went on to get her Master’s in architecture, from Columbia University, in New York. She done internships in England, France and Italy, but it was the repetitive, monotonous rhythm of hundreds of soviet-built housing cities she saw in Czechoslovakia that most influenced the way she looked at building facades. After completing her studies, she decided to use all of the acquired knowledge in the name of art, by creating impressive architectural models from paper.

Christina Lihan first decided to dedicate her life to art during the time she spent living in Florida, designing hospitals for another architect. She was really bored, and realized she needed a creative outlet so she just started cutting paper, playing with it and trying to turn it into building models. It sort of grew from there and ultimately became her passion. Her impressive creations are made from unpainted, 300lb, watercolor paper. She carves, cuts and folds every little piece by hand until she assembles them into a completed composition. Ms. Lihan starts by photographing the site she wants to replicate, then moves on to sketching with charcoal, and finally enlarges the drawing to the desired size of the finished piece. She generally places the detailed pieces of paper directly over the drawing.

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The Mind Blowing Paper Collages of Nathalie Boutté

Nathalie Boutté is a talented French artist who uses thousands of simple strips of paper to create impressive collages.

Born in 1967, Nathalie lives and works in Montreuill, near Paris, where she experiments with all kinds of types of paper, to obtain the results she desires. She has always been passionate about paper, and has worked with everything from tissues to old novel pages and lately, translucent tracing paper. After the sheets of paper have been cut into long strips, they are layered in a way similar to tiles on a roof, revealing only their tips, which act like pixels in a giant collage. Although most of her artworks are pretty big, the dedicated artist says she isn’t scared of working with large formats, on the contrary, the bigger the collage, the more impressive it is. And I have to say, Nathalie Boutté’s pieces are pretty impressive.

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The Eco-Friendly Junk Mail Portraits of Sandhi Schimmel Gold

Using a technique she calls Acrylic Mosaic Fusion, artist Sandhi Schimmel Gold takes junk mail and other paper waste and turns it into beautiful portraits.

Phoenix-based Sandhi Schimmel Gold has been fascinated by art for as long as she can remember. In her youth, she spent most of her days sitting quietly in the bedroom, drawing, and she remembers cutting school to spend her days in museums and art galleries around New York City. Although she studied art in school, Sandhi says she is pretty much self taught, and most of her works are influenced by her extensive travels.

The artist first felt inspired to create mosaic portraits years ago, when she was in Venice, Italy. She saw a portrait made of small colorful glass fragments ans since it was to heavy to transport home, by train, Sandhi decided to create one just like it. After a period of trial and error using glass and tile, she decided to change her art medium to ephemera.

Now, using upcycle junk mail, post cards, photos, calendars and other paper junk together with water-based, non-toxic paint, Sandhi Schimmel Gold creates the most amazing mosaic portraits. She doesn’t use any kind of technology or dies in her art; everything is hand-cut, hand-applied, hand-embellished and hand-finished. “My vision is to create beautiful yet thought-provoking images of beauty” says Sandhi, and she manages to do it by using paper waste most people throw away.

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The Mind-Blowing Origami Sculptures of Eric Joisel

Eric Joisel was one of the most gifted origami artists the world has ever seen, and even though he recently passed away, he lives on through his amazing folded paper masterpieces.

Eric Joisel dedicated most of his life to art, in many of its forms, including drawing and sculpting. He took up origami in 1983, and just four years later had his first exhibition, in Paris. It was proof of his immense talent, but the French artist knew that it took a lot more hard work to take his art to the highest possible level. Whenever someone asked him how long it took him to finish one of his paper artworks, he would say “35 years, because that is how long it has taken me to get to this level.”

Unlike the paper boats or birds people usually associate with the art of origami, Joisel’s works are more like paper sculptures created from a single sheet of paper. The blueprint for a single figure could take several years to complete, and the folding process lasted hundreds of hours, but the result was truly magnificent. By dampening the sheet of paper, the artist could curve it into intricate shapes, allowing him to create details like furrowed brows or veined hands. Some of his larger creations, like the paper rhino you’re about to see below, were created from giant sheets of paper, measuring 15 feet by 25 feet (about the size of a studio apartment).

Although his works sold for thousands of dollars, Eric Joisel lived in a modern farmhouse, and spent several hours a day working on his origami sculptures. He died on October 10, 2010, from lung cancer. He was just 53 years old, and had so much more to give to the art world…

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The Intricate Paper-Cut Maps of Karen O’leary

They may not be as helpful as conventional maps, when you need to find your way through a metropolis, but Karen O’leary’s hand-cut paper maps are simply stunning to look at.

Karen O’leary is definitely one of the most patient people on the planet. She spends most of her days cutting away at thick white watercolor sheets of paper, until she creates jaw-dropping replicas of conventional city maps. While you could easily mistake Karen’s hand-cut maps with laser-cut ones, the amount of time and patience she puts into every one of her works makes them unique masterpieces. For each one of her maps, the artist spends a great deal of time drawing it in detail, and only after begins the painstaking process of cutting.

If you’d like to own one of Karen O’leary’s intricate hand-cut paper maps, you can find a wide range of cities, from Madrid to Sydney, at her online Etsy shop. While the $1,100 price tag may seem a bit discouraging, judging by the amount of effort Karen puts into her art, you’ll find it’s a bargain.

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Quilling – The Art of Turning Paper Strips into Intricate Artworks

Quilling has been around for hundreds of years, but it’s still as impressive and popular now as it was during the Renaissance.

The art of quilling first became popular during the Renaissance, when nuns and monks would use it to roll gold-gilded paper and decorate religious objects, as an alternative to the expensive gold filigree. Later, during the 18th and 19th centuries, it became a favorite pass-time of English ladies who created wonderful decorations for their furniture and candles, through quilling.

Basically, the quilling process consists of cutting strips of paper, and rolling them with a special tool. It sounds simple enough, but special skill is required to create more advanced shapes like marquises, arrowheads or holly leaves. All through the years, the art of quilling has remained almost unchanged, but new specialty supplies now allow quilling masters to create anything from detailed 3-D figures to wall-sized museum installations.

Because it requires so few supplies, quilling is available to anyone with enough patience to give it a try, and with a little bit of practice you’ll be creating some pretty amazing paper artworks, just like iron-maiden-art, whose works I think show the beauty of quilling.

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Chinese Student Builds Boat Out of Paper

Wang Luyao, a junior student at the Commercial Service College in Wuhan, has built a perfectly functional boat out of sheets of paper.

In an attempt to raise awareness about recycling, and green living in general, Wang used his paper boat to cross from one side of the Hanjiang River to the other. Escorted by two normal canoes, the young student jumped in his paper boat and rowed the 800-meter distance in just seven minutes, proving that boats made of recycled paper really are an environment-friendly solution.

Wang Luyao’s paper boat is 1.9 meters long, 1.2 meters wide, weighs 45 kg, and is made out of raw sheets of paper that the young student collected, himself.

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Jeremy May Creates Jewelry from Book Cutouts

We’ve seen books used as an art medium before, but never as material for unique pieces of jewelry. Jeremy May manages to capture the beauty of paper and makes it available to everyone, in the shape of various fashion accessories. His Littlefly jewels are made from hundreds of laminated sheets of paper, covered by a layer of gloss.  As each of his pieces are impossible to replicate, they are all unique.

The pages for Littlefly jewels are carefully selected, and the finish products are shipped with the book they were created from. It’s not like you can read it anymore, but it make a great packaging.

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Chinese Restaurants Serve Paper-Made Dishes

As a way to attract new customers, many Chinese restaurants have started serving dishes made with a kind of edible paper.

Eating paper has so far been considered an eating disorder. For some reason, some people just can’t help themselves and gobble whole sheets of paper, every day. It can be hazardous to their health, but above all it’s a weird habit that you can’t share with everyone. Luckily, eating paper doesn’t have to be weird anymore, thanks to edible paper. A factory in China’s Nantou City has been making this revolutionary material from fibers found in vegetables and fruit, and the local restaurants quickly adopted it as an ingredient. Now, tourists and locals alike are crazy about the foods cooked mainly from the edible paper.

To be honest, I’d definitely try some of these paper foods myself, they don’t look half bad.

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The Paper World of Jeff Nishinaka

Los Angeles based Jeff Nishinaka is one of the world’s best paper manipulating artists. He creates amazing 3D paper sculptures, by handling paper in the least invasive way.

Although you could swear Jeff Nishinaka has been creating paper sculptures since the day he was born, he didn’t discover his passion for this art form until he attended the Art Center College. He was determined to become a painter, when he was given assignments in both graphic design and fashion drawing to experiment with different art mediums. He had what he likes to cal an “ah-ha!” moment when he discovered paper, and has remained faithful ever since.

He began working with different types of paper, learning how to shape, bend and twist them onto various shapes that ultimately became amazing artworks. Because he treats paper like a living, breathing thing, Jeff Nishinaka manipulates paper in the least invasive way, trying to maintain its integrity. This makes his works special, and easy on the eyes.

Jackie Chan, a close friend of Jeff Nishinaka, owns the biggest collection of the artist’s paper masterpieces.

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