Paper Animals: Welcome to my new/only blog!

Hello all! My first blog!! I feel so grown up now ;-) This will be for those of you who are interested in keeping tabs on what art projects I'm working on and for those of you who want to see some "behind the scenes" in-progress photos. I like to work in a lot of different media but have primarily been working with paper as of late. I will let ya know what I'm working on regardless of medium though. I will also make sure to share with you any other cool tidbits of info I may come across as I do love to collect and learn interesting things about animals and our awesome natural world! That's right...AWESOME!

So I thought I would just start off rather simply by showing some previous work, starting with the most recent.
"Surgeons of the Wild" I started in December of 2009. I made the large supply cabinet, seen on the left, then got involved with working on other dioramas and projects. I finally started working on it again in December 2010 making the phone and then the pieces just started to fall together from there. I finally finished it February 19, 2011.

Original sketch for "Surgeons of the Wild"

"Surgeons of the Wild" Feb 2011

detail of the operation

detail of x rays, supply cart, and tool tray

detail of wash area


overview with better view of supply cabinet

"Playtime" Dec 2010

detail "Hummingbird in Headphones" Nov 2010

"Hummingbird in Headphones" Nov 2010


"Hummingbird in Headphones" 2010

Finished box and the original sketch for the flamingos diorama. I was at the Field Museum in Chicago looking at this display of flamingos and for some reason thought "if they were all upside down they would look like great break dancers". I'm not exactly sure which flamingo in particular sparked the initial thought, may have been a combination.

"The close examination of the dance off between two break dancing flamingos" Oct 2010. The first version of this box didn't have a boombox in it. I added it a few months later and everything suddenly made so much more sense. This is my favorite box to date.

"The close examination of the dance off between two break dancing flamingos" Oct 2010

"Wombats and Wallabies: Outlaws of the Outback" April 2010. There was about a 6 - 12 month period when I was obsessed with the idea of going to Australia. I was going to do one of those volunteer vacations and help conservations efforts for one particular type of wallaby. I didn't end up going but did make this silly and playful diorama.

"Wombats and Wallabies: Outlaws of the Outback" April 2010

"Psychotherapy for Rabbits" April 2010

"Psychotherapy for Rabbits" overview with original sketch below. This box ended up having 64 individual hand made books (for the intellectuals), tiny hand made bird skeleton (for the natural history buffs), 5 tiny hand made butterflies (for the nature lovers), and soothing ocean sounds (for everyone)!.. ok, so no ocean sounds... but you get lots of other great stuff!