Paper Child: A New Art

Paper Child is a new, strange and almost inexplainable phenomen. Probably grown out of the miniaturisation fetish, it involves humans interacting with smaller, childlike paper cutouts to create interesting photo opportunities. It’s existence and popularity has been spread through artistic sharing sites like deviantart.com. There you can find many paper child artists of various degrees of skills.

Grown out of anime/manga culture, paper children first became popular in Japan and Korea. They can look like just about anything. But most are small, humanlike figures. Surreal and mesmerizing, some are sweet, some are created for pornographic purposes, some are drawn pictures of popular anime/cultural characters.

To create a paper child, first you must draw a person that’s about the size of your hand. Try to use heavier paper as your average printer paper probably wont be thick enough. The key is to draw a creature in some kind of motion. A common paper child trick is to draw a character that looks like they are being lifted up by a giant crane.

Once you’ve finished drawing, the next step is to carefully cut it out and possibly colour it. Then its simply a matter of setting up your paper children in a particular pose and then take a photo.