PAPER ORIGINALS
These are personal and commissioned one-of-a-kind paper works by Beastie and Bone. To have paper art piece created for your business, event, or organization, please see Collaborate.
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Look closely — yes, these are all made of paper.
Intricate. Fragile, but renewable. Transformed constantly by light and shadow. My work combines the delicacy of paper as a medium with the visual realities of survival, adaptation, and loss in the wild world while blurring lines of time, dimensionality, and perception.
Typically, I depict extinct or endangered species. Often, I pair the two together, encouraging reflections on how we engage with and value the wild world both past and present, and inspired by cyclical forms of life and labor. Working with eco-friendly papers like mulberry (which is made of harvested bark, not wood pulp) I am inspired by my struggles with chronic illness and the endurance and beauty I have encountered across American wild ecosystems, and the similarities between the human and wild worlds.
First, I create digital illustrations inspired by my background in printmaking and focused on shape and contrast, calling to our instinctual ability to recognize a silhouette (Predator, or prey?). These illustrations I methodically layer into paper structures akin to sedimentary rock or pop-up books, inviting a childlike sense of familiarity and wonder back into encountering the wild. Others I develop further, adding color and line detail harkening to old natural history illustrative plates. Through the alchemy of cutting, layering, interweaving, painting, and inking, these become dimensional works that play with viewers’ preexisting familiarity with the species presented in almost specimen-like form.
Beetles become behemoths. Can you believe how strong they are, now?
Fossilized antlers shrink to fit through a door. Do you notice now how twig-like their branching has always been?
Combining art object with nature curio in this way, they cut through the grey areas of specimen collecting and citizen science to present the wild up-close, without instinctual fear or ethical quandaries on sourcing, and ask: What do you notice now?
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All of my illustrative and paper works are created entirely by myself, hand drawn, hand cut, hand detailed. At no point has generative AI been used in my creative process, and it never will be.
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The selection of paper originals shown here include private client projects as well as works created for display in a variety of shows across the US, including:
39th Annual Western Visions Show, National Museum of Wildlife Art 2026 (Sequestered In Bloom)
100 & Under: Small Works, Arrowmont Downtown Knoxbille Gallery 2026 (Flutter and Float)
Hexapodian Days, The North Museum of Nature and Science, 2025 (Fallen and Polyphemus Moth I)
WILD, Jen Tough Gallery 2025 (Annual Cicada I)
Every Creature’s Story, Poetic Tiger Gallery 2025 (Emperor Cicada I)
Dogwood Arts Regional Exhibition 2024 (The Old Growth)
State of Exploration, Witte Museum of Natural History 2024 (Seraphim I)
Dogwood Arts Regional Exhibition 2023 (Ancient Keystone)
Re-imagining Conservation: From Many Viewpoints, National Museum of Wildlife Art 2023 (Once and Future King)
Pollination Syndrome, Ghost Gallery 2022 (Marble and Gold)
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Currently available works can be found in the Beastie and Bone online shop.
"Sequestered In Bloom" 2026
"No Less Lovely" 2026
"Cleverly Concealed" 2026
"Direwolf and Dogwood" 2026
"Appalachian Bouquet" 2026
"Herculean Gold I and II" 2026
"Sunk Deep" 2025
"Persist" 2025
"Golden Emperor Cicada I" 2025
"Bat-Wing Cicada I" 2025
"Desert Daggers" 2025
"The Green Vein" 2025
"Once In Appalachia" 2024
"Fallen" 2024
"La Brea Bouquet" 2024
"Johanna's Triceratops" 2024
"A Singular Violence" 2023
"Thing Is Ever Wasted" 2023
"Hope Eternal" 2023
"Once and Future King" 2023
"Pale Death" 2023
"Seraphim I" 2023
"Crowned Saber" 2022
"Virgin Tiger Moth" 2023
"Marble and Gold" 2022
"Counterweight" 2022
"The Fanged Water Deer" 2020
"The Mask" 2020
"Fragile" 2020
"Double Crown" 2020