Tina Kraus

Two of Tina Kraus's most precious talents are a keen eye for detail and enough patience to dedicate herself to extremely delicate artworks, painstakingly assembled in a time-consuming labour of love. She studied design and illustration at the University of Applied Sciences in Münster, Germany, where she’s based, and lived in Seoul, South Korea, for a while as an exchange student. Crêpe paper is her material of choice; she is constantly experimenting with it and developing new ways to create something original. When she’s not in her studio, she’s either cooking some delicious vegan food or exploring the world on her bicycle.

Tina Kraus specialises in lifelike, detailed sculptures of animals and plants, made from crêpe paper, a tissue paper coated in sizing. She also engineers paper to create pop-ups and paper toys. Tina worked on her first commercial pop-up children’s book while studying at university and developed a pop-up book about a circus for her diploma work. She has worked from a studio set up in her apartment since 2011. She has two desks, one for the digital work and one for crafting and painting. There is also enough space to store her materials and tools. Tina tries to recreate the beauty and weirdness of nature with paper, aiming to show people that species that are often disregarded and threatened also hold beauty and value.

Tina Kraus loves working with paper as a medium because it is so versatile and easily obtainable. She constantly experiments and develops new ways to work with this material. Tina has been crafting paper ever since she was a child, and started to create her own pop-up cards when she was in her teens. A few years ago, she came across some botanical crêpe paper sculptures, and they fascinated her. This inspired her to work with crêpe paper, and she created her first animal, a goliath stick insect, from this material in 2017.

Magnae Chartae Exhibition