Look closely at the sleeping polar bear above. The fur, the heavy paws and the soft muzzle are made of paper, cut and layered by hand. The bear is a work by Calvin Nicholls, a Canadian artist who has spent more than three decades turning sheets of white paper into animals that seem to breathe.
Nicholls started experimenting with paper sculpture in 1983, while running a graphic design studio in Toronto. He saw a colleague use folds of paper to catch highlights and shadows, and he began building scenes in paper to photograph for print. Over time he realised the originals could stand on their own as art. Today his pieces are low-relief sculptures, only a few centimetres deep, framed in shadow boxes and lit so that each curl of paper throws its own small shadow.
His work combines drawing, model making, sculpture and photography with a lifelong interest in wildlife. He is a member of the Society of Animal Artists and Artists for Conservation, and his birds have been shown in the juried Birds in Art exhibition in Wisconsin. His largest single collection, more than 75 pieces made over about 16 years, belongs to Follett Library Resources in Illinois. The images below show how a sculpture comes together and a selection of finished animals from the series shared online as his "Paper Zoo."
From sketch to sculpture: how Nicholls works
The same polar bear while it was still being made, on a cutting mat surrounded by blades, tweezers and offcuts. You can see the method. A smooth base form shapes the body, and hundreds of separate fur pieces are glued over it, row by row, from the back of the animal towards the face.
Nicholls at his easel, adding feathers to a bird with outstretched wings inside its frame. Behind him is a large-format bellows camera of the kind he used for years to photograph finished pieces. He now uses digital cameras, but lighting is still central to how the work is seen.
An owl in flight, held in the artist's fingers to show its scale. Each wing feather is a separate cut piece, scored down the middle to suggest a shaft and gently curved. Nicholls has described the drive behind this detail simply: "I feel really, really motivated to get as much detail as I can in fur and feathers."
A koi carp on the cutting mat, with pencils nearby. This piece is a nice exception to the "white paper only" rule often repeated about his work. The orange and black scale patches are coloured paper. Most of his animals are white, but he does use colour when a subject calls for it.
Fur, whiskers and faces
Fur is the hardest texture to fake in paper. Nicholls studies anatomy so that each lock of hair falls the way it would over real muscle and bone. He uses 100 percent cotton archival paper in several thicknesses: thinner sheets for fine hair, heavier ones for structure, legs and claws.
A Japanese macaque, the "snow monkey" of central Japan, with flakes resting on its coat. The face is built from a few smooth, carefully curved planes, while the fur around it bristles with thousands of narrow strips. The contrast makes the eyes the focus of the piece.
A wrinkly, flat-faced dog seen from above, tongue out and tail curled, breaking out of its frame. The playful pose and the soft folds of skin show that Nicholls is not only interested in wildlife. Alongside his wildlife pieces, Nicholls takes on commissions as well as advertising and editorial work.
A beaver family at work among gnawed branches and wood chips, with a kit swimming below. The scene is a good example of how he layers several animals and a background into one shallow frame. The water and the bitten sticks are all paper too.
A fennec fox, the small desert fox of North Africa known for its enormous ears. Those ears help it shed heat and hear prey moving under the sand. In paper, their thin, veined surfaces are some of the most delicate parts of the piece.
A Canada lynx stretched out over tall grass, ear tufts raised. Lynx are native to the boreal forests of Canada, so this is a local subject for the artist. Note how the grass in front is cut as free-standing blades that cast shadows onto the cat.
A North American porcupine climbing a branch, quills fanned out. Each quill is an individual sliver of paper. Against the dark background the piece reads almost like a pencil drawing, until the light shows its depth.
A mother chimpanzee holding her infant on a branch. Primate faces are a challenge because expression depends on tiny changes in the brow and mouth. Here the soft, layered hair contrasts with the smoother skin of the faces and hands.
A zebra mare standing over her resting foal. Here the stripes are made with tinted paper set into white, one of the few places in the series where colour carries the design. The contrast also helps separate the two animals in a narrow frame.
An orangutan hanging from one long arm, reaching beyond the top of the frame. The long, shaggy coat of orangutans is built from very long, thin strips. Letting the arm break the border is a trick Nicholls uses often to make the animal feel as if it is moving towards the viewer.
A giant panda feeding on bamboo. Pandas eat bamboo for most of their waking hours, and the leaves here are cut and creased one by one. The panda's famous dark patches are only hinted at through tone and shadow.
Birds and feathers
Birds are a favourite subject. Nicholls has said they come together faster for him than animals where musculature and structure dominate. Even so, his largest single work, a Greater Bird-of-Paradise, took close to 300 hours.
A small owl perched on a needled branch. The feathers on its breast are layered like roof tiles, the way real contour feathers overlap to shed rain. The branch and pine needles stretch out of the frame and give the composition its shape.
A flock of doves spiralling up through an arch. With so many birds, the challenge is to vary the wing positions so the scene feels like motion rather than repetition. Every bird is a separate sculpture.
A hummingbird feeding at a lily. Look at its belly: rows of tiny, scalloped feather pieces build up the soft breast plumage, while the wings are long, crisp blades. The bird and flower are both pure white, so the image depends on light and shadow alone.
Small songbirds, probably finches, flitting around thistle heads. Goldfinches in particular feed on thistle seed, so the pairing is true to life. The spiky thistles are cut in fine fringes that catch the light like real seed heads.
Why white paper works so well
Working mostly in white might seem limiting, but it focuses attention on form. With no colour to distract, the eye reads shape from shadow. That is why Nicholls lights and photographs his pieces so carefully. A raking light across the surface turns a few millimetres of relief into a convincing sense of depth.
His process starts long before the cutting. He researches a subject using reference photos, field trips and, at times, advice from biologists. Then he makes a final drawing that maps out the layers. That drawing becomes a tracing-paper pattern, from which every component is cut, then embossed, scored, curled and glued onto the body form. Smaller works take him a couple of weeks. The largest take several hundred hours. As he puts it, "Every piece is a discovery of sorts too."
See more of his work
Calvin Nicholls shows new and older pieces, and offers prints and commissions, on his official website and his Facebook page. If you enjoy paper art, his work is a good place to start before exploring other relief and papercut artists. And if you try it yourself, start small: a single feather or leaf, cut from good paper and lit from the side, will show you how much a simple sheet can do.
Sources: Calvin Nicholls, official website; Cornell Lab of Ornithology, All About Birds: Birds of Light and Shadow; Design and Paper: Calvin Nicholls turns fine papers into low relief sculptures. All sculptures and photographs © Calvin Nicholls.
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