The ultimate guide to papermaking

Making your own paper is a mesmerizing and versatile craft. Let Modern Papermaking show you how to create countless paper sheets with a few tools and practice. Among many other things, the paper you make can be a foundation for painting, illustration, stationery, and lettering. Handmade paper can upgrade the starting point of your creative work, or you can use the techniques to create stand-alone works of art to display, gift, and share. The craft is relatively easy and accessible since all the essential tools and supplies needed can be DIY'd, recycled, and thrifted.

Dorothy Field is a visual artist who uses handmade paper for sculptural works and artists’ books.

Marieke de Hoop runs PapierLab in Rotterdam, the Netherlands. She has been making and experimenting with paper for the past 40 years using traditional papermaking techniques. De Hoop works with other artists and makers to create unique, beautiful and sustainable papers and products.

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Therese Zemlin has worked in a range of media, including paper, welded steel, light, digital media, and natural materials. Her work ranges from small sculpture to installation and is inspired by elements and phenomena of the ever-changing natural world. She has exhibited her work nationally, and has received numerous grants, including a Southern Arts Federation/National Endowment for the Arts Regional Fellowship, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant. After earning a BFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and an MFA from the University of Texas at Austin, Zemlin taught Fibers and Sculpture at the University of South Carolina, Columbia; Appalachian State University in North Carolina; and Phillips Academy Andover. She currently divides her time between Saint Paul and the north woods of Minnesota. 

Jennie Frederick earned her BFA from the Kansas City Art Institute in fibers, followed by an MFA from Indiana State University. She apprenticed with Douglass Morse Howell, Bob Serpa, from Imago, and received her MFA for apprenticing at Twinrocker Handmade Paper. Frederick founded Kansas City Paperworks, Inc. in 1983 and has taught at the Kansas City Art Institute and MCC-Maple Woods, where she developed a Fiber & Papermaking Program. She is currently a full-time artist living in Santa Fe, New Mexico and her current work utilizes techniques/processes that she developed following documentation in the Mexican villages of San Pablito, in Puebla State, and Lacanha and Naha in Chiapas.

Brian Queen has been making paper by hand for 30 years and utilizing a wide range of materials and techniques. His interests span the book arts including hand papermaking, bookbinding and letterpress printing. As a craftsman and toolmaker, he explores how new technologies such as 3-D printing, laser cutters, and CNC machines impact the book arts. Along with his brother, he owns and operates Sensa-Light Ltd., a company that manufactures customs architectural lighting for offices, hotels and restaurants.

Sammy Lee is an artist based in Denver, Colorado. Lee was born and raised in Seoul, South Korea, and moved to Southern California at the age of sixteen. She studied fine art and media art at UCLA and architecture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Among her many accomplishments is a performative collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma during the Bach project tour in 2018.

Peter Thomas is a book artist, and a hand papermaker with a special interest in production papermaking. He has been making fine press and artist books in collaboration with his wife Donna Thomas since 1977. All of the books they make us their own handmade paper, and some of their books relating to papermaking include Beater Time Tests (1987), A Collection of Paper Samples from Hand Paper Mills in the United States of America (1993), Paper from Plants (1997), The History of Papermaking in the Philippines (2005), Tuckenhay Mill: People and Paper (2016), and Paper Samples (2022). Peter Thomas has written books and articles about papermaking and the book arts, produced a documentary/educational video titled “The Ergonomics of Hand Papermaking, and been active in the leadership of IAPMA (International Association of Papermakers and Paper Artists), and the Friends of Dard Hunter (now North American Hand Papermakers).

Madonna Yoder started folding origami tessellations after taking Erik Demaine's Geometric Folding Algorithms class at MIT and she has designed over 300 new tessellations since 2018. Yoder helps aspiring tessellation folders to deeply understand tessellations so that they can fold from crease patterns, reverse engineer from photos, and even start designing their own tessellations through online videos and courses with her business, Gathering Folds. And unlike most origami instructors, she doesn't focus on individual designs in tutorials, but instead teaches broader structures, theory, and skills so that you can start folding new designs with confidence and get the most out of any tessellation workshop you attend.

Jane Ingram Allen is a sculptor and installation artist who uses hand papermaking with natural materials and collaborative processes to create indoor and outdoor artworks that raise public awareness about environmental issues. Jane has received numerous awards for residencies and community public art projects in the USA, the Philippines, Japan, Nepal, Brazil, China, Tanzania, Taiwan, Turkey, Indonesia and other countries. She was a Fulbright Scholar artist-in-residence in Taiwan in 2004 and 2005 and a Fulbright Specialist in Turkey in 2015. Jane is a former college art instructor and currently teaches workshops and writes about art for SCULPTURE and other art magazines as well as doing independent curating. She was born and raised in Alabama and has lived in 7 different states and in Taiwan for 8 years. Since 2012 she has been based in Santa Rosa, CA, and continues showing her work in the US and internationally.