Charming Cut Paper Characters Inhabit Colorful Three-Dimensional Worlds

Illus­tra­tor Malin Koort crafts tiny three-dimen­sion­al worlds from cut paper and doc­u­ments them with clever light­ing and pho­tog­ra­phy. The charm­ing scenes fea­ture car­toon­ish peo­ple and crea­tures as they move through the good, bad and the in-betweens of life. In each piece, Malin uses a shal­low depth of field to spot­light the main char­ac­ters while also pro­duc­ing the illu­sion that they are in a much larg­er space.

Malin appre­ci­ates the sub­tle changes that can make a big dif­fer­ence in her paper cut art. “I like that so much can hap­pen with the mood and every­thing else just by chang­ing the light and focus when you’re pho­tograph­ing,” she tells Bibelot. “You can move around the dif­fer­ent objects in the illus­tra­tion, and in that way tell a dif­fer­ent story.”

Work­ing this way, how­ev­er, is not with­out its strug­gles. “The most chal­leng­ing part is that it’s quite time-con­sum­ing and there­fore not real­ly opti­mal when making—for exam­ple mag­a­zine illus­tra­tions,” she says. “But I love work­ing with all dif­fer­ent aspects of it, from draw­ing the sketch­es to build­ing the images, light­ing and pho­tograph­ing. So I wouldn’t want it any oth­er way!”