Meet the Artist
Doug Roy
Fiber Arts—Decorative
LIn Doug Roy’s early years he worked mostly in pen and ink, and watercolor or prisma color, illustrating for publishers and ad agencies in the LA area. In the late 1970’s he moved to Oregon with the “great migration” and worked out of Portland. In the very late 1980’s he began to play around with paper using samples he had gathered through the years. The first things he made out of paper were some fairly crude paper buildings that made up a little village for the family’s mantle one Christmas; shortly followed by some snowmen. They weren’t much, but he was hooked. (He did have one of his later ornaments hung on the White House Christmas tree.)
It was in the early 1990’s that Doug started using the different colors of paper to sort of ‘paint’ with the paper and frame the work as he does now. Most pieces are made up of hundreds to thousands of intricately hand cut bits of paper some smaller than 1/64th of an inch in size. Because of some of the minute detail in his pieces, he was encouraged to enter miniature art shows around the world and has won many national and international awards for his work.
The tools he uses are fairly simple: Exacto knife, toothpick, rulers, Elmer’s glue, and various hole punches. Working with paper is the most fun he’s had making art. It is the one type of art he feels the most creative and competent in making.