Paper Toys & Art That Pops
Today’s spotlight is on Leah DiPasquale, a gifted illustrator and graphic designer known for her vibrant artwork and eye-catching paper toys! (She has even designed whimsical fabrics with enticing motifs including “Crabulous Tacos,” a “Bagel Party,” and the bright geese depicted above!)
We first encountered Leah’s work during LightUpPopUpTober 2024, an Instagram challenge focused upon creating themed pop-up’s for the month of October. That year, she created 31 unique paper pop-up trucks with glowing headlights! The following year, as a member of our LightUpPopUpTober 2025 Team, she created an intricate series of 31 light-up, pop-up Valentines, each with a distinct paper-engineering element. (We invite you to check it out, because words fail to do this series justice!)
Leah’s creativity and boundless ingenuity are remarkably inspiring; we are honored (and excited) to introduce her and a bit of her work with you here.
What used to be me putzing around with pixels became me cutting, folding, and gluing artwork into something I could hold.
Leah DiPasquale
Please tell us about yourself.
I’m an illustrator and graphic designer based out of Madison, Wisconsin. I love illustrating and creating paper toys, pop-ups, and other paper crafts. I love making these because it’s always fun to see the final piece at the end. Between the three, I enjoy making paper toys the most because they’re fun to play with.
How did you get your start?
My journey into this creative world began in highschool, when I decided that I wanted to be an illustrator. I went to college and got a degree in Graphic Design where I have been working ever since. In my free time, I would focus my creative energy on creating digital illustrations for fun. Since my dream was to illustrate children’s books, I created illustrations in Adobe Photoshop geared towards the younger audience. I developed a sweet and playful illustration style, built a portfolio, and eventually published illustrations in children’s books and magazines.
How has your work evolved?
After my daughter was born, my love for children’s books shifted away from making them and just more into reading them. The time commitment for crafting 32 pages was too much, but I still loved creating smaller projects and illustrations.
I was at the store one day and saw a cute box of animal crackers that looked like a bus. The box itself was mostly square, but its cardboard extended a bit to create wheel shapes. I thought that this playful packaging was so cool that I wanted to learn how to make cute packaging and paper toys, too. At the time, I worked as a packaging graphic designer where my favorite part of the role was creating the mockups for sales meetings. I would print out the designs, cut them, and fold them up into boxes. I really enjoyed working with dimension, so I wanted to find ways to apply this to illustration.
I began creating treat boxes shaped like houses, paper toys shaped like cars, and eventually began playing with folded pop-ups. In 2024, I joined in the PopUpTober challenge to create and share a pop-up every day in the month of October. In 2025, I joined in the LightUpPopUpTober challenge and found a love for crafting with light. It was so much fun challenging myself to add the light element, and so inspiring to see how others were using lights in their creations.
When I’m not doing artsy things, I enjoy biking and spending time outdoors. I’m not a big fan of winter, but this year, I’m hoping to do some ice skating with the family at one of our local park’s outdoor rinks.
What can you tell us about your artistic process?
My artistic process begins with thinking up an idea. A lot of the time, inspiration comes to me from things that I think would be fun to make, so I brainstorm ways to bring it to life. If I’m completely stuck on how to do that, I pour through Pinterest where I have boards filled with tons of inspiration. I mix and match different structure techniques until I come up with something new.
Next I create my artwork. For this, I work digitally in Adobe Illustrator where I switch up my style depending on what I’m making. Sometimes I use a lot of detail and gradients in my artwork, sometimes I focus more on brushy lines, and sometimes I play around with patterns. I love working with bold color pallets and I love drawing animals, so I try to incorporate characters into things that I’m making whenever I can.
While I’m creating my artwork, I am also building it around the dieline I created. Depending on how complicated my structure is, I might do a few tests to make sure everything works and lays out correctly. Once everything is good and the artwork is ready, I print it out. From there, I cut, fold, and assemble into the final structure I’m making.
For projects with lights, I usually put my circuit on the back of the card. My setups are usually pretty simple where I make sort of a square with the conductive tape between the battery and light. I punch a hole for a button to go over it and extend my circuit’s tape over the hole a little bit. I cover it with a button piece that has conductive tape on it to connect the circuit when pressed.
What inspires you?
One of my biggest inspirations and motivators is my daughter. I first began creating paper toy Valentines when she was a baby. As she grew up, I began finding more and more ways to make fun things to create and share with her.
What challenges and joys have you encountered during your creative journey?
One of the biggest challenges I have encountered through my creative journey is the rise of AI art. As a digital artist, I used to pour hours of work into creating digital illustrations that I made for fun just to post on my social media. I didn’t mind the time commitment because it was something that I enjoyed doing. However, now that digital art could be generated in seconds, it completely killed the joy for me. The thing I really loved doing suddenly just felt like a waste of time.
Creating art is never a waste of time, but I still couldn’t get past that feeling, so I began looking for ways to make art that couldn’t be so easily replicated by AI. I decided to move into a more tangible direction, which is part of what lead me to paper crafts.
Today, I still pour hours into projects, but the creative time is spent differently. I loosened up my illustration style so I could focus more of my time on designing and incorporating them into fun structures. What used to be me putzing around with pixels became me cutting, folding, and gluing artwork into something I could hold.
How are you using light in your creations?
I first began using lights in my creations in 2024 with Chibitronic’s LightUpPopUpTober challenge. That year, I created a series of pop-up trucks that had lights as their headlights.
This year for LightUpPopUpTober, I created a series of Halloween-themed Valentines. This let me play around with using lights in a variety of different ways.
After creating a month’s worth of light-up pop-ups, I found a few favorite ways of using the lights. One of the easiest go-to’s for me was to make light-up eyes. My cards were Halloween themed, so spooky glowy eyes worked perfectly. Another way I used them was to have them behind my pop-up element to illuminate the scene. However, my favorite way of using the lights was to have it reveal something secret. I print art on the back of a lightweight cardstock and have it pop up over the lights. When the lights are off, it looks like one thing, and when the lights are on, it reveals something else.
My favorite Chibitronics product is the Conductive Fabric Tape. In my first year of PopUpTober, I was connecting LED’s with wires, so it was much easier to use the tape. For the lights, the solid colored lights are my favorite, especially the magenta one [available in the Tropical Mega Pack] because it’s so pretty. The Rainbow Fades are also pretty cool for projects that leave the light on for a bit.
Learn More
To learn more about Leah DiPasquale and her art, visiting her Illustration Gallery here, or her profile on Instagram @leahdipas_art.