Realistic Animal Created by Densely Rolled Newspaper by Artist Chie Hitotsuyama

What you can do with wet newspaper? For me, throw in the trash. However, Japanese paper artist Chie Hitotsuyama can roll the wet newspaper into strips then form lifelike sculptures of wild animals. In order to create her sculptures, Hitotsuyama applies water on each strip to make it damp and limp. Then she rolls and twists the wet paper strip and piles them up into layers to make the basic body. Finally, she carefully constructs the sculpture by binding and forming the paper strings together. Hitotsuyama uses papers with different thickness and contours in order to achieve the desired form. She even takes advantage of the colored prints to bring variations of colors into her newspaper animal sculptures.

When asked why to chose newspaper as a medium, Hitotsuyama said she chose “old, thrown-out newspapers” as a medium for the animal sculptures because they are “easily obtained” and represent “an accumulation of the history and stories of human behavior.”

If you like Hitotsuyama’s work, you can follow her on Instagram.