Once Upon a Paper makes quality design, gouache and watercolor paintings.

In nooks and corners Cold remains: Flowers of the plum
- Yosa Buson

We create outstanding artwork to put your wedding, anniversary or family celebration in style.
Our museum quality artwork and products are made in finest materials, love, and with outstanding handcrafting and painting. It is designed and purposed to be displayed as a centerpiece in your home for years to come, to delight, harmonize, and even enhance positive energy of your room, and to bring back the most dear memories of a perfect day.

We are constantly inspired by travels, architecture, cherry and plum blossoms, seasons and nature. We love painting. And we love the touch and feel of paper, watercolor, gouache, oil colours, and are not limiting ourselves to one technique. We are dedicated to detail and quality handcrafting throughout our product range.

We had been working in the architectural field for 10 years in various firms in NYC, including world renowned Skidmore, Owings and Merrill (SOM), but in 2007, with the feeling of a more pressing creative impulse, we started exploring commercial venues for our artistic expression.

The artwork derived from our day to day experience. As an architect you always start with pencil on paper. You need to sketch your ideas and give form to many aspects of a building and it’s surroundings. Many times your space planning drawings start looking like a cluster of basic geometric shapes following a structure. From there, our pattern paintings surfaced, especially the Trees of Life.

Until 2012, we were happy and proud with what we accomplished, selling online, going to art fairs, having satisfied customers that checked back on us for new work. But the day came when we received a request, to give one of our trees a new purpose, that of a guest book. And it all grew organically with every new product type being specifically requested by a new couple.

We were slowly drawn into this world of personalized artwork. It clearly suited our trees to be part of such an important moment in people’s lives, as they are a symbol of new beginnings, shelter, support and endurance beyond our existence. So many stand now as a silent witness to the promises made and signed by the bride and groom on their handwritten and painted Ketubah.

Our Ketubah is a piece of art that combines ​abstract graphic​s​ and ​traditionally ​symbolic elements​, such as the tree of life,​ with a body of text, adapted and written specifically for the couple getting married.

​OnceUponaPaper ketubah collection has its modernity revealed by the sophisticated line style, various compositional graphic layouts, the embodiment of the wedding theme through vibrant color palettes or subtle harmonies, and use of specific genre of style, exploration of specific cultural symbolic archetypes, like platonic solids for instance, or geometric sacred architectural elements.

The way we preserve the traditional ground is by subtly or sometimes boldly embedding iconic motifs into the design. Traditional Jewish motifs like David’s Star, the pomegranate, the tree of life, the well-known Song of Solomon's phrase “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine”, or key words like “Love” and “Life” are often encountered in our designs. ​