Harukiru Papercraft Artist Turns Food Packaging Into Art

Harukiru Papercraft Artist Turns Food Packaging Into Art 

Meet Harukiru, a Japanese empty box sculptor, who turns snack packaging into amazing paper sculptures. A design student at Kobe Design University, he possesses a keen eye to turn an ordinary cardboard snack box into something unbelievably artistic.

Not only does Harukiru possess a fertile imagination to visualize his cardboard sculptures, but oodles of patience, too, to spend hours cutting up boxes of snacks, such as Ritz, Toppo, Pringles, Moonlight cookie, Nestlé coffee and many more, and gluing them together. The end product is always something really wonderful.

The designs are not Harukiru’s figments of imagination but are inspired by the designs on the box themselves. This is because he respects the image of the original box and tries to emulate it as much as possible. This makes his craft even tougher to accomplish. Some paper sculptures, such as the winged lion figure cut from a Ritz cracker box, required three days to make!

Harukiru began paper sculpting after watching an educational Japanese TV series, ‘Tsukutte Asobo’, that focused on making toys out of paper and other common household materials. This TV series acted as a great motivator for him and he started crafting paper sculptures from any material he could lay his hands on.

However, it was the colorful snack boxes that really ignited Harukiru’s imagination. His first paper sculpture was made out of a Meji chocolate box that he posted in June 2017. There was no looking back after this.

When someone jokingly asked Harukira whether he ate all the contents of the snack boxes, he candidly replied, “It’s going to be a long battle!”