I love making paper pieces, but I love making a series of paper pieces centered around a theme. I have always wanted to do an alphabet series, so I decided to take on the challenge in 2021. The first step was coming up with the list. I started with asking my followers to suggest characters and they provided me with some amazing ideas.

But as I sifted through the suggestions, I wanted to make sure that I had a variety of characters - cartoons, movies, literature, anime, even real people. I wanted to make characters that were iconic, but I also didn’t want to make too many characters that had been made frequently. Once I had a pretty diverse list (which, admittedly, changed about 20 times as I thought of other characters and switched them out), I began planning the layout.

Each character would have to fit in a specified box that would fit on a single piece of poster board. That helped with planning consistency and design with each character as well as establishing some limitations (honestly, when there are limitations established, it can sometimes make things quite a bit easier). Once the layout was determined, the fun could really start.

Each character was a labor of love. From designing, cutting, to assembling, to finishing the piece, there is a lot of heart in every character. But what I liked most about making these pieces was the scope that I was able to cover. Some of the characters were relatively simple to design and execute, while others had various accessories, like Ace Ventura or X-Men, that made them more complicated and time-consuming. And ones like Kermit, which happens to be my favorite one, involved more planning like determining colors, textures and specialty papers, adding dimensions to the layers, all while reimagining a classic character in a style that is recognizable yet unique.