Trained as an architect, Barcelona based paper artist Raya Sader Bujana of Little Ray of Sunflower brings paper to life with her serial plane cut works. In advance of the upcoming Olympic Games in Rio, she has produced this incredible series of Olympic athletes made from hand cut layers of paper.

The idea for this series began as a proposal by photographer Abel Mitja, who specializes in Stock photography for providers such as Getty Images. He commissioned Raya to produce a collection of figures that would showcase the Olympics in paper and he could add to his collection of stock images.

For Raya, the series was a challenging opportunity to explore the curves and movement of the human body through paper. She began by digitizing the postures of athletes, carefully recording their precise shape and form.

Next came the hard word of cutting. Raya explains, “I hand cut all of the pieces and used tiny 3mm separators to assemble them. It was a huge job as some of the figures have around 150 tiny pieces and up to 500 separators. The project required many, many hours of work, but the end result was very satisfying for me.”

The beautiful images you see above of the complete collection were taken by photographer Leo García Méndez (@leocroma).