Love: Cut Paper Typography

January 9, 2014

With Valentine’s day coming up I thought it was finally time to create a cut paper typography version of the word love. I’ve had a few requests for this word to be cut, and it’s the perfect fit for the design and red paper. The previous words were Art, Make, and Create.

While the letters were traced from existing typography the design was cut freehand from red card stock. The finished size is 8.5″ x 11″.

I have listed this in my Etsy shop as an unframed original. I’ll have a few more Valentine themed pieces to share soon.

Paper Cutting Timelapse

December 10, 20131 Comment

In preparation for my Creative Mornings talk I felt it was important to include examples of my making so it wasn’t all talk.

I used two time lapse videos, one shot and edited by Lee and Sachi LeFever of me making their yarn tree. The second video I did myself using iTimelapse on Boris’ iPhone 5.

This is about an hour of work. Every time I watch this I am amazed I don’t cut my fingers more often….

Laser Cut Work for the Eastside Culture Crawl

November 12, 2013

In preparation for the Eastside Culture Crawl I decided to translate two more of my paper cuts into laser cut wood. I went with bamboo plywood again simply because I had a few pieces left over from the commission I did for Earnest Ice Cream. Both of these are 23.5″ in diameter.

Remember the manhole cover design I created for Ironclad Art in the spring of this year? When it didn’t make it as a final selection I always had it in mind to use the design for something else. Here it is realized in laser cut bamboo. It would’ve made a crazy, mind-blowing manhole cover on the streets of Vancouver.

This second piece is a translation of the flowerburst/fireworks I’ve been making multiples of for an installation. I cut one much larger than the others (about 9″ in diameter instead of the usual 3″) and this one was the basis for the laser cut. At this larger size of 23.5″ in diameter the design feels really intense. My initial reaction upon seeing it was, “this is crazy!”

I am very excited with the potential for further laser cutting explorations, and how well my paper cut work translates.

Come see these pieces and more at my studio this weekend during the Eastside Culture Crawl.

Work In Progress: Paper Cut Sculpture

November 11, 2013

I have a group show coming up in March of next year at Hot Art Wet City. Recently I came to a decision about the work I want to create for this exhibition, and so I started a new paper cut sculpture.

I want to have three of these triangle sculptures for the show. The one pictured here is the second, and the first I shared previously on my blog. Each will be cut in a different pattern. I want to show these inverted but I need to figure out how to make a stand for them.

Part of my plan for these sculptures is to translate them into another more durable material using laser cutting. I’ll be digitizing the individual pieces before I finish and assemble the completed sculpture. I think this will look amazing in wood or metal.

Work In Progress for If Walls Could Talk

October 23, 2013

In March of next year I will be creating an installation at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto for If Walls Could Talk. This site-specific installation will be a collaboration between myself and Bruce Alcock, the Creative Director of Global Mechanic. Our project is called Canopy and will combine many different elements from yarn drawings, to paper sculptures, along with digital projection, and sound elements.

I began work on this project in September and have been sharing my progress on Instagram. To date I’ve been working on producing multiples of maple leaves cut from white paper, which will be suspended from the ceiling. For once I am not cutting these by hand (because that would be crazy), but instead have been using a digital cutter.

The ceiling in my apartment has been the stand-in space for my explorations in how to assemble and suspend the leaf clusters from the ceiling. The leaves are cut individually, and then fitted together during hanging. It looks beautiful.

A variation of this same process has been to come up with a composition of paper wings that will eventually evolve into a lantern. The image here is of a small hand-cut rough I did to mock up the idea.

I eventually created larger more refined wing shapes for the digital cutter to produce, and assembled these in a similar fashion to the maple leaf clusters. The bottom image is of a prototype I mocked up and is hanging in my dining room so I can contemplate its further development.

This project is very different than anything I’ve worked on previously. I sometimes find the scale of it staggering, because there are a long list of elements that still need to be made. It’s also been a bit weird working on something with a long term production schedule, versus the short term gratification of small projects I am used to.

Triangulating Paper Cut Sculpture

October 17, 2013

I was preparing some work for a gallery proposal last week and I came across these photos of a paper cut sculpture I completed over the summer. The piece was shown during my solo show at the Ranger Station gallery in July, but I’d forgotten to share it elsewhere. This is the largest paper cut sculpture I have created to date, with its longest side at 18 inches.

This is a larger version of a prototype I made in early spring. It’s about four times the size of the original piece and I was curious to see how the same structure would hold up in a larger size. It sags when I stand it up on the smallest side so my goal is to create something in order to balance it on the top corner of the triangle. It’s more beautiful when balanced in this way.

After all these months I’m just getting back to making paper cut sculptures, and completed a new one this week. I’ll share it once I get around to photographing it properly.

Laser Cut Commission: Earnest Ice Cream

October 9, 20132 Comments

I am pleased to present this recent commission I completed last week for Earnest Ice Cream. The piece was installed in the shop last Saturday morning and will be on permanent display.

Ben and Erica reached out to me over the summer about creating artwork for their new scoop shop that opened on Fraser Street in August. As our discussions began about what sort of work they wanted for the shop I had just done the first experiment of translating my paper cut designs into laser cut wood, and this is what they chose to go with.

Because their budget was limited we chose the design from existing paper cut work, which you can see in my portfolio. From there I scanned the work in two pieces (because it was too large for the scanner), then assembled and cleaned it up in Photoshop.

The most involved bit of work in this process was creating a clean outline of the design using Illustrator. I don’t have a lot of experience using this software so my friend Kirsti kindly gave me a crash course in what I needed to know. I used the trace function to create the outline but it was hours (and hours) of tedious work to clean it up into something usable.

This is a key step because the laser cutter works with vector files, and the cleaner the outline, the better the final product.

The finished piece is cut from bamboo plywood, and was fabricated by Hopewell Works Ltd. This is a laser cutting and engraving fabrication studio, located right in my neighbourhood, and I was referred to by Derek of Laser Cutter Cafe. The people at Hopewell Works really know their stuff, and it was great to work with them.

It was a huge learning curve to figure out how to make this piece, and I could not have done it without the help of Boris, Arnt, Val, and Kirsti. Each one of them shared their knowledge with me, or lent a hand in some essential way.

Creating An Installation One Piece At A Time

September 23, 20133 Comments

Back in July I began a side project involving the creation of small individual paper cut pieces that resemble flowers or fireworks. Since then I’ve been slowly working away at this at irregular intervals with the goal of making as many as I can.

All these months later an I have made about eighty of these flowery bits, and I intend to keep going. They are cut from drawing paper painted with blue ink and each is about 3.5″ inches wide. It’s very satisfying to see the tiny pile of them grow.

The idea behind this is to create something larger from these small pieces. At the moment I’m not yet sure what form this will take or how these will all come together, but it will eventually be a striking installation.

For now my goal is to create one hundred and figure things out from there. Stay tuned for more updates…

Circles and Animals: The Turtle

September 20, 2013

The Turtle is the last of the Circles and Animals series for awhile as I’ve shifted my focus to other projects for now. I’ve been pondering ideas around creating an installation out of the circle cut layers of paper but haven’t yet figured the whole thing out.

The Turtle is the eighth piece in this series, all of which are made from two layers of circle cut paper within a wooden cradle frame.

Previous work from the series -> (Rabbit, Mouse, Fox, Snail, Owl, Crow, Koi)

Circles and Animals: The Rabbit

September 18, 20131 Comment

The character of the White Rabbit is what started this series late last year so until recently I wasn’t interested in making yet another bunny. But it’s an animal well suited to the abstract background of circles.