A new wrinkle in the 2007 Kalamazoo Animation Festival International’s unique “Cartoon Challenge” competition is that Steve Hansen, “The Picasso of Papier Mache,” has agreed to design, create and sign trophies for the event.

Ten teams from animation schools across the United States were chosen in a competition to come to Kalamazoo, Mich., prior to the May 17-20 festival. They will engage in a “24-4” endeavor to conceive, script, design and produce up to a 30-second animated feature on a public-service topic over four days.

They will be competing for the People’s Choice and Judges’ Scholarship awards, the special trophies for which are being produced by the former-Kalamazoo-based sculptor whose favorite creative medium is papier mache. Each of the teams will receive a smaller Hansen sculpture for participation in the Cartoon Challenge.

In addition to being a major ingredient in the Smithsonian Institution’s “Information Age: People, Information and Technology” exhibition, Hansen sculptures are on display in Sri Lanka, Quebec, the U. S. Information Agency, Copenhagen, and at U. S. embassies in Italy and Venezuela.

Corporate collections are housed in the headquarters of Borg-Warner, Capital Records, Hughes Aircraft, Herman Miller, Standard Oil of Indiana, and Mark Twain Banks.

Hansen has also been featured at one-man shows in New York City, San Francisco, New Mexico, Colorado, Philadelphia, Chicago, Saugatuck, and the Kalamazoo Institute of Arts.

Hansen probably cringes a little bit when he sees what is being used as temporary carpeting for canaries and parakeets, or as wrapping paper to take care of the remains of the daily catch from the ol' fishing hole.

Because to Hansen, those old newspapers are the means of his artistic expression. They are his clay, his canvas, his raw film, his molten metal. Yesterday's newspaper is today's medium for him.

Hansen moved from his home state of Washington to Michigan in 1966 when he was still in high school. His father, a farmer and logger who ran into financial problems in the Pacific Northwest, shifted careers and went to work for the Dow Chemical Co. in its public-relations division.

After graduating from Midland High School in 1968, he came to Kalamazoo as a Western Michigan University student where he sampled many majors, including religion, over a three-year period and paid his college costs by selling his papier-mache creations. Those also financed many a trip to southern California, Baja, Spain and Italy when the grind of college became too bothersome.

But the return ticket always seemed to be stamped Kalamazoo in those days, where he found a creative, pleasant environment to try metalsmithing, jewelry making, wood carving, and oil painting.

But it was his papier-mache artistry that allowed him --beginning in 1967 -- to make a living from his art, a skill that began to take shape as a third-grader when he got his hands full of gooey chunks of newspaper. By the age of 13, he had entered one of his figures in his first exhibit. By 17, he was being paid real money to produce them.

In his creative periods, he can craft about 100 a year, some of them made from a whim and some emanating from a waiting list. The size of Hansen's figures range from six inches to nearly life-size.

Hansen, 56, remained in the Kalamazoo area into the early 1990s, operating out of a studio in the old Saniwax building, before relocating in the American Southwest.