While you put the finishing touches on a lopsided snowman in your front yard, ice and snow artists around the world build life-sized ice castles, hotel rooms made of packed snow, and delicate ice sculptures stretching dozens of feet into the air. Illuminated at night, these amazing temporary structures built in some of the world’s coldest places each year look like something out of a winter fairy tale.

Hotel de Glace, Quebec

(images via: hôtel de glace)

The only true ice hotel in North America, Hotel de Glace opens each January with a new theme. In early 2013, that theme was “A Journey to the Center of Winter,” inspired by the Jules Verne novel “Journey to the Center of the Earth.” It had 44 guest rooms as well as a spa, restaurant, chapel and a bar made of ice.

China Snow World Festival

(images via: inhabitat)

Incredible replicas of Renaissance architecture, classic Russian architecture and other impressive structures are recreated at China’s Jingyue Snow World Festival each year. While not quite life-sized, this ice and snow architecture often reaches heights of thirty to forty feet. They’re hand-carved using low-tech tools.

Castles at Sapporo Snow Festival, Japan

(images via: david mckelvey)

For just seven days each February, millions of visitors gaze upon intricately carved ice architecture and other large-scale sculptures for the Sapporo Snow Festival on the streets of Sapporo City. More than 10 teams compete in the International Snow Statue Contest to build structures reaching 50 feet tall and 150 feet wide, including life-sized dinosaurs. The largest structures can cost up to $100,000 to create, so they’re typically sponsored by countries or corporations.

Harbin Ice and Snow Sculpture Festival, China

(images via: wikimedia commons)

Harbin, China transforms into an ethereal showcase of ice architecture and sculptures illuminated in bright colors each January. The annual festival began as a traditional ice lantern garden party in 1963 and is now the largest snow and ice festival in the world, taking over virtually the entire city, with a unique theme each year.

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Intricate Ice Architecture 17 Fantastic Frozen Buildings

Billowing clouds of cut paper installations that cast dream-like shadows on a gallery wall, delicate paper drawings plastered on gritty urban surfaces, complex layered sculptures of hand-sliced paper and intricately crafted sheets the size of tapestries: paper art in its many forms is elevated to new heights by these 14 (more) masters of the craft. Bovey Lee, Hunter Stabler, Jen Stark and 11 other artists transform an often-disposable material into stunning works of art that will make your jaw drop. See 48 more works by 14 additional artists at WebEcoist.

Bovey Lee

(images via: boveylee.com)

China-born, Pittsburgh-based artist Bovey Lee creates what might just be the most intricate paper art of all, hand-slicing the tiniest pieces of paper into amazingly flawless shapes and patterns. “The underlying themes in my paper cutouts are power, sacrifice, and survival,” she told the Pittsburgh Cultural Trust. “Drawing ideas from my cultural identity and gender, headline news, environmental issues, and socio-political commentaries, I painstakingly hand cut each work on a single sheet of paper that depicts layered and dramatic narratives. The deep paradoxes in my works contrast starkly with the airy, fragile laces of the cutouts.”

Mia Pearlman

(images via: miapearlman.com)

Paper artist Mia Pearlman fills entire rooms with her billowing, cloud-like installations. “My process is very intuitive, based on spontaneous decisions in the moment. I begin by making loose line drawings in India ink on large rolls of paper. Then I cut out selected areas between the lines to make a new drawing in positive and negative space on the reverse. 30-80 of these cut paper pieces form the final installation, which I create on site by trial and error, a 2-3 day dance with chance and control.”

Nava Lubelski

(images via: navalubelski.com)

Looking like some kind of organic growth, these rolled paper sculptures by Nava Lubelski are crafted from tax returns, rejection letters and other unwanted papers. Says the artist, “Shredded paper sculptures, such as the Tax Files, reconfigure a mass of paper that has been grouped and saved due to written content, into slabs reminiscent of tree cross-sections where the climate of a given year, and the tree’s overall age are visible in a single slice. Historical information is revealed in the colors of deposit slips, pay stubs, receipts and tax forms. The cellular coils spiral outward, mimicking biological growth, as they are glued together into flat rounds, which suggest lichen, doilies or disease.”

Miso

(images via: cityofreubens)

The delicate, ephemeral qualities of paper are a stunning contrast to the grit and solidity of urban environments in the hand-drawn street art of Australian artist ‘Miso’ (Stanislava Pinchuk). “Like folk art, it comes to have a very particular, practical function,” Miso says. “It brings us together as makers, viewers and consumers, finding new pieces and exploring the possibilities of our cities.”

Hunter Stabler

(images via: hunterstabler.com)

Philadelphia artist Hunter Stabler renders arcane symbols and imagery in his complex paper cut-outs, often in shades of gray with pops of brights. A current exhibition at the Observatory gallery in Brooklyn, entitled ‘Alchemically Yours’, focusing on the “art of transmutation. Of taking the rough and raw, and rendering it more precious. Rather than accepting the literal “lead into gold” definition, Carl Jung believed that alchemy is a process of individuation, a symbolic and active language which guides one’s personal journey toward the realization of selfhood. An alchemist is a shape-shifter, a mystic chemist.”

Pablo Lehmann

(images via: pablolehmann.com)

Pablo Lehmann’s incredible paper creations consist of layered sheets of paper, hand-cut with text and abstract shapes and stacked for a three-dimensional effect. The Buenos Aires, Argentina-based artist has shown his work at galleries in South America.

Tomoko Shioyasu

(images via: scaithebathhouse)

Swirling vortices of water and wind, along with the complex natural structure of cells, provide inspiration for jaw-dropping, huge cut paper tapestries by Tomoko Shioyasu. Measuring as large as twelve feet high and eight feet wide, Shioyasu’s tapestries are especially breathtaking when displayed in white gallery spaces as the negative space in the paper allows intricate patterns of light to shine through.

Lim Siang Ching

(images via: this is colossal)

Infographics come to life in colorful, three-dimensional framed displays by Singapore graphic design student Lim Siang Ching. The artist created these posters as degree projects when graduating from LASALLE College of the Arts.

Gjertrud Hals

(images via: gjertrud-hals.com)

While many other paper artists cut, burn or sculpt their chosen medium into works of art, Gjertrud Hals takes a different tack: spraying paper fibers onto sculptures made of thread or wire. The final result often looks organic in nature, resembling veins, coral or spiderweb.

Jen Stark

(images via: jenstark.com)

“My work is inspired by all sorts of things, from wormholes, to how micro and macro designs relate to each other, and the layers of a plant, to outer space,” says artist Jen Stark, a Miami native who began creating her unusually vibrant brand of kaleidoscopic paper art while studying abroad in France. Stark layers cut pieces of colored construction paper into three-dimensional sculptures that are sometimes so deep, you can reach your hand into them.

Aoyama Hina

(images via: hinaaoyama)

Imagine the focus and steadiness of hand that it must take in order to create such tiny paper cut-outs by hand. Japanese-born, France-based artist Aoyama Hina captures an incredible amount of detail in flowing script and the cells of a butterfly’s wing.

Julene Harrison

(images via: madebyjulene.com)

Want a beautiful paper illustration or portrait of your very own? British paper artist Julene Harrison takes commissions, often producing stunning custom works for weddings and other special occasions.

Yulia Brodskaya

(images via: artyulia.com)

Yulia Brodskaya combines typography with papercraft art to create three-dimensional designs that really pop. Brodskaya, a Russian artist living in the UK, sought to bring together her love for the two separate art forms and has done so beautifully, with a style unlike any other.

Elod Beregszaszi

(images via: elod beregszaszi)

Buildings, cities, geometric shapes and even human faces spring out of three-dimensional folded and cut paper sculptures by Elod Beregszaszi. From a WebUrbanist profile: “The fragility of Elod’s work makes it that much more appealing. Like sculptures made out of sand, the perfect use of such a delicate material makes the perfect symmetry that much more wonderful to behold. Elod Beregszaszi is able to create labyrinth-like tiers of folded paper that look almost like an imaginary city viewed from above. The level of detail he places into each piece is truly amazing.”

It’s a spider web so large, a human family could set up furniture and make a home inside of it. But this stunningly sticky creation is no work of nightmarish monster spiders – it’s an art installation made of packing tape by design collective For Use/Numen.

With its long, hollow tubes suspended five feet in the air from surrounding walls and pillars, the packing tape cocoon is like a giant artistic bounce house/jungle gym for adults, who can crawl inside and lounge around, comfortably supported by 117,000 feet and 100 pounds of tape.

“The installation is based on an idea for a dance performance in which the form evolves from the movement of the dancers between the pillars,” For Use’s Christoph Katzler told Fast Company, who produced this video. “The dancers are stretching the tape while they move, so the resulting shape is a recording of the choreography.”

The project – which has grown progressively larger, starting in a small Croatian gallery and then inside an abandoned attic before moving on to the former Viennese stock exchange building pictured – will get a bigger stage than ever in September when it travels to a public space in the center of Frankfurt, Germany.