With this paper, a pair of household shears and a No. 2 lead pencil with half its stem sharpened away and half its eraser rubbed down, Paulos spends about eight hours a day creating elaborate Madonna scenes held together by paper slivers and strings. Paulos first draws his sketch in reverse on the white side of the paper, a process that took him about a year to master. Then he cuts away the white that is not a part of the design. When he is through cutting, he flips the paper skeleton. He then glues the black form onto white paper.
Some works are mostly black with only chips and chunks of white cut away.
From others Paulos has removed most of the white and left only fragile halos and flimsy flower garlands to coax the paper into a graceful image. It looks as if you've done something with pen and ink. You can't visualize how, if you took the black away from the white, the white is by itself, and the black is just hanging in your hand. Paulos traces the art form to the Chinese, who used stones to chip patterns in the paper they invented 2,000 years ago. From China, paper cutting techniques traveled to Europe and then to America, Paulos said.