Stephanie Wunderlich is a German illustrator who uses various forms of paper craft to create her illustrations. She has a talent for continually finding new and inventive ways to work with paper, and piecing together powerful images.
The overall way in which Stephanie works is and combination of collage and papercut techniques, mixing it up with varying surfaces. While some illustrations will have mostly finely cut block shapes, others with include found imagery and hand-drawn marks.
We really like that she is always changing it up in that way, playing with pairing different methods to keep her work fresh and interesting.
Stephanie talks to us about the steps that she takes while working on a project, from the first cut, to the finishing touches on the screen.
I am an illustrator based in Hamburg / Germany. My main tools are scissors, scalpels, paper and glue to create papercut artwork mostly for editorial clients in Germany and the USA.
I start my working process with lots of rough sketches that I use later, when they are more defined as templates to cut out the different elements of my composition.
I like the roughness, the bold graphical language of the cut shapes. All the single elements remain unfixed until the composition seems balanced to me.
I move things around and try out different colors. Like in digital work, everything can be withdrawn. Once everything is fixed and scanned, I start doing digital retouching.
Sometimes, I add in Photoshop small elements that I wouldn’t be able to cut out precisely like eyes or lips. Lately, I try out different ways to mix up digital and analog work even more.
© Stephanie Wunderlich, 2015
