Tissue Paper Illustrations Celebrate the Animal Kingdom With an Unexpectedly Printmakerly Feel

You might think of tis­sue paper as only being used for gift wrap, but Stacey Elaine has anoth­er use for it—the raw mate­r­i­al in her illus­tra­tions. “The idea to work with tis­sue paper came to me as I was falling asleep one night,” she writes, “and since I start­ed work­ing with this medi­um it has felt more nat­ur­al and effort­less than any­thing else I’ve ever made.” Using an X‑Acto knife and care­ful cut­ting, she cre­ates por­traits of crea­tures often paired with flo­ra or oth­er nat­ur­al ele­ments. Each piece has small, dec­o­ra­tive pat­tern­ing, whether it’s in the wings of the bird or the arrange­ments of the tis­sue paper itself.  When scanned, the flat­ten­ing makes these pieces look like they were done with print­mak­ing tech­niques; the opac­i­ty of the tis­sue paper mim­ics the roll of a brayer.

Stacey is hard at work on her lat­est series. “I’m cur­rent­ly work­ing on com­plet­ing a col­lec­tion of works fea­tur­ing tis­sue paper illus­tra­tions of col­lec­tive nouns for ani­mal groups! I got the idea after cre­at­ing a piece titled ‘Hud­dle of Wal­rus­es,’ which was one of the most dif­fi­cult pieces I’ve ever com­plet­ed,” she shares with me. “I’m work­ing with a restrained col­or sto­ry, focus­ing espe­cial­ly on cre­at­ing strong designs, all cut free-hand from tis­sue paper. My hope is to com­pile them all for a children’s book that I hope to have pub­lished someday.”

Stacey sells her work as orig­i­nals and prints through her online shop. See her work in progress on Insta­gram.