Interview: How a Personal Project of Paper Plants Blossomed into a Thriving Career

Raya Sad­er Bujana keeps plants that many of us dream of own­ing. While you might fret about the amount of sun­light your fid­dle leaf fig is get­ting, she does­n’t have to wor­ry about where the plant is placed. Her life­like botan­i­cals are fash­ioned out of paper!

Raya took the scenic route in her path towards paper art. She first went to col­lege to become an archi­tect but ulti­mate­ly left to pur­sue her cre­ative pas­sion. Now, 20 years lat­er, she’s still “play­ing with paper” and approach­es her incred­i­ble art­work with an exper­i­men­tal atti­tude and a lot of research on con­struc­tion and form.

I was elat­ed to talk to Raya about how she began her career and the process of cre­at­ing her paper plants. Scroll down to read our inter­view. You can find Raya on Insta­gram and Etsy.

How would you describe what you do? 

Peo­ple some­times ask me what I do for a liv­ing and I nev­er know how to explain it with­out show­ing them pho­tos, LOL, and even then, they say, ”OK, so this is your hob­by, but what’s your *real job*? ” haha

I guess I’m a paper artist? I feel like what I do is sculpt paper, I would­n’t describe it as typ­i­cal paper craft­ing which is usu­al­ly a lit­tle more geo­met­ric, I guess… I think my approach to paper is more organic.

How long did it take to get where you are today?

It took me a *long* time to get where I am now, and I’m still always learn­ing and try­ing to push myself fur­ther, I’m for­ev­er a stu­dent. I first start­ed exper­i­ment­ing with paper art when I was in uni­ver­si­ty study­ing archi­tec­ture, I would turn over all my draw­ings and projects in paper and saw my teach­ers loved it 🙂 That was 20 years ago, and I’ve been play­ing with paper one way or anoth­er since then.

What are the tech­niques you use in your work? Where/how did you learn them?

Is there a name for my tech­niques? LOL, Usu­al­ly I hand draw direct­ly on the paper I’m gonna use, a sim­ple out­line of what I want to make and then start cut­ting in the final shape and details free­hand with a scalpel or art knife, I work very hard on tex­ture and shap­ing the paper to achieve vol­ume, this is such an impor­tant part for me.

I also apply a lot of tech­niques from oth­er dis­ci­plines, for exam­ple, if I want to make a bas­ket or a shoe, I’ll research how a real bas­ket or real shoe are made and then apply weav­ing tech­niques or shoe­mak­ing tech­niques trans­lat­ed to paper, it usu­al­ly takes a lot of tri­al and error and a lot of 3D sketch­ing to get to what I want, but I like the end result 🙂 I also think most of my knowl­edge comes from many *many* years of mak­ing archi­tec­ture mod­els, I always par­tic­u­lar­ly loved the tini­est ones, would you have guessed? haha

You trained for years to be an archi­tect. How do those skills and sen­si­bil­i­ties inform your work now?

I think archi­tec­ture has influ­enced every­thing I do, I feel like I apply in some way every­thing I learned, every­thing from col­or, com­po­si­tion and mod­el mak­ing, to struc­ture, archi­tec­ture taught me to see the world dif­fer­ent­ly (I love it so much 🙂 ) and I feel it’s always present in what I do.

What was the inspi­ra­tion behind your ear­li­est paper plants?

My own plants, or ones I want­ed but could­n’t find haha, also, the first large leaves I made were trop­i­cal plants, it was win­ter here and I missed home 🙂 . I start­ed mak­ing the tiny ones as a per­son­al project, actu­al­ly all the plants and leaves I’ve made (I start­ed the large leaf project about 5 years ago) have been per­son­al pieces, I so enjoy mak­ing them, and I allow myself to push as far as pos­si­ble for details, I like the chal­lenge of tiny paper details 🙂

What are your favorite tools to use? Any that you can’t live without?

My tools are very basic, I use a pen­cil, paper, and my scalpel or art knife most of the time, oh and some glue, and I can’t live with­out my col­lec­tion of knives LOL

When cre­at­ing a new piece, what’s the first thing that you do?

Usu­al­ly, I sketch a bit and just start work­ing on it, I’ll go through books and images for research, some­times I’ll make a 3D sketch and try build­ing a piece, so I can cut and rebuild and try and shape it just like I want it 🙂 It’s a fun process for me.

Many of your paper cre­ations are so small—some fit on the tip of your fin­ger. What’s the biggest chal­lenge to work­ing at a small scale? How do you over­come it? 

I don’t just work on a small scale, but I real­ly love it, the biggest chal­lenge I guess is reach­ing an inter­est­ing amount of detail, its what I enjoy most I think, some­times it’s a chal­lenge to actu­al­ly see what I’m doing LOL, I’m con­sid­er­ing a mag­ni­fy­ing glass haha

How do you know when a piece is done?

Tough ques­tion, usu­al­ly when I hear my moms voice in my head telling me that ”Bet­ter is the ene­my of good.” I’ve learned to stop myself from con­tin­u­ing to work on details with­out any con­trol because I’m capa­ble of going on and on and on … haha, I think pieces are nev­er real­ly finished 🙂