Surreal Paintings Pop off the Page When Extracted for 3D Paper Art

Artist and illus­tra­tor Andrea Wan cre­ates some of my favorite sur­re­al art. For years, I’ve admired her paint­ings of peo­ple fused with botan­i­cals and archi­tec­ture. Not afraid to branch out from con­ven­tion­al 2D ink paint­ings, Andrea has trans­lat­ed her dream­like sen­si­bil­i­ties into three dimen­sion­al paper art.

For these pieces, Andrea has con­tin­ued to paint on paper like her oth­er works. But instead of leav­ing them flat­tened, she extract­ed the flo­rals, arms, and rib­bons and placed them on a black back­drop. Of them, Andrea writes, “I like how the curled paper gives a pop-up effect to the draw­ing. When I was a teen I used to cut out ele­ments from fash­ion mag­a­zines and stick­ing them on the wall for inspi­ra­tion.” She con­tin­ues to rem­i­nisce. “Doing this now some­what reminds me of the days before social media when we use to col­lect inspi­ra­tions or things we cov­et­ed in a rather per­son­al way.”

Andrea sells her work in her Tic­tail shop.

Andrea Wan translates her previously 2D paintings into 3D paper art that bends and curls off the page.

Here are some of Andrea’s latest portrait paintings. You can also get her work as stickers for your iPhone!