Category: Paper

Rearranging the Landscape of Maps

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All the playing with paper last week is leading somewhere interesting this week as I continue to work with maps. I’ve been cutting many circles and transforming them into triangles, which then in turn attach together to become a larger form. The play of shape, form, with the colours and textures of the map paper are making for interesting things.

Work in progress - Cut maps

Work in progress - cut maps

I haven’t included a photo of the overall work, but it’s about 33″ x 27.5″ at the moment and is made up of about one hundred cut circles. The bottom photo here hints at where I hope to go with this, and intersperse small paper cuts throughout.

Playing With Paper

This week I’ve been brainstorming ideas for upcoming proposals and projects, which has led to playing with paper in new ways. I broke out some of my books about working with book pages for ideas. These are some of the things I’ve ended up with.

Book page house
Book page house

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Paper tubes made from origami paper and bobby pins

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Circles and triangles, and recycled maps.

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It’s these last two photos that hint at the latest technique I’m going to obsessed with. It’s exciting to discover EVEN MORE things to create from paper.

A Murder of Paper Crows

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Last week I began working on an installation I’ll be presenting at Illuminares in July. I was pleased when my proposal was accepted because I love the lantern festival, and it’s a big step to move from an observer to a participating artist.

Paper crows

As you can see by my work-in-progress photos, the theme I’m focusing on is the crow. I’ve created a flock of fifty birds so far, each one individually cut from tyvek using four different card stock templates as guides.

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I chose to work with white paper because it will illuminate better than black, but I was also inspired by the rare albino crows. Imagine a whole flock of those and you get the idea.

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I still have a lot more work to do on this project, including making twenty to fifty more crows. I’m really enjoying the process of bringing this idea to life and how it’s evolved from my initial idea.

Save the evening of July 21st in your calendar if you’d like to see this installation in person.

Paper Cut Collage Designs on Etsy

Presenting a few more of the recent paper cut collage designs. These three are my favorites, especially the first two on the page because of the colour and paper choices. The best part about making these is playing around with origami paper and trying out different combinations together.

Paper Cut Collage Design
Paper Cut Collage Design-2
Paper Cut Collage 8″ x 8″ | Etsy listing

Paper Cut Collage Design-3
Paper Cut Collage Design-4
Paper Cut Collage 8″ x 8″ | Etsy listing

Paper Cut Collage Design-5
Paper Cut Collage Design-6
Paper Cut Collage 6″ x 6″ | Etsy listing

Each one is available for purchase in my Etsy shop.

Paper Cut Collage Designs

Now that Got Craft is over I am sharing more of the paper cut collages I made in preparation. Each one is created from a piece of black card stock using freehand paper cutting with an xacto knife. I’ve been using brightly coloured and patterned origami paper to collage them, with an additional piece of cardstock on the back to add thickness. Each one is mounted onto a wooden cradle panel painted black.

Paper Cut Collage Design-3
Paper Cut Collage Design-4
Paper Cut Collage 6″ x 6″ | Etsy listing

Paper Cut Collage Design
Paper Cut Collage Design-2
Paper Cut Collage 8″ x 8″ | Etsy listing

Paper Cut Collage Design
Paper Cut Collage Design-2
Paper Cut Collage 6″ x 6″ | [SOLD]

I’ll share the rest of them tomorrow, and hopefully this week I will get to making larger pieces. Stay tuned….

Bringing Together Paper Cuts and Collage

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I realized yesterday that I need to come up with a title for the series of organic looking paper cut forms I’ve been working on. My mind is drawing a blank at the moment so I’m open to suggestions.

When I shared some of these the other week they seemed more like a sketch than a finished piece. I’d been contemplating what to do further with them in terms of finishing and display. I liked backing the paper cut designs with coloured paper, but I hated the idea of enclosing them in traditional matting and framing. Then I came across Bill Zindel’s Geometric Collage and my brain began churning around the idea of collaging them with many different patterned papers.

I used the same three different patterned origami papers with both of these, and pieced it together at the back. I backed everything with a second piece of black card stock and cut away the excess paper. They are mounted onto wood panels (what is normally the back) and I painted these black for a more dramatic effect.

Origami collage paper cut-3
Untitled | 6″ x 6″

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Untitled (detail) | 6″ x 6″

Origami collage paper cut
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Origami collage paper cut-2
Untitled (detail) | 8″ x 8″

The patterned paper gives them a nice KAPOW of colour and plays off the smaller shapes within the larger form.

Once I figure out my pricing I’ll be making these available in my Etsy shop, as well as sharing them with the public at Got Craft? on May 6th.

Exploring Shape and Form

For the past few weeks I have been slowly working on a proposal for an artist residency happening later this year. I began writing it over a month ago but realized there was so much preliminary exploration and thinking I needed to do before I could really write the thing. So I backtracked a bit, sifted through my ideas and thoughts, and figured out what I wanted to do. Yesterday I sat down again to make a proper attempt at writing and this morning was able to send off a first draft to a team of editor friends for review and feedback.

The paper cut designs I’ve been focused on lately is part of the work I am hoping to explore further with this residency. I just hope I’m articulate enough in my proposal to make it interesting.

These four designs were created over the course of the past week. I’m using black card stock, and backing these with brightly coloured paper. Each iteration begins with the same basic crescent shape to create a larger organic form, and is done through freehand cutting of the paper.

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Paper cut

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I’m excited to see the group of these together. I know I can keep working in the same way to create infinite variations of these organic designs. They are enjoyable to make because there is an aspect of meditation to the repetition of cutting, and looking at the finished form gives me the same feeling I get when working on them.

Paper Cut: Mapping Out New Work

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I’ve never been much of a sketcher of ideas, but lately this seems to work well when it comes to working on new paper cut designs in my sketchbook. But instead of a pencil I work with an exacto blade.

Sketchbook Page

The top image is of the sketchbook work, and the bottom image is of a “paper test” on a scrap piece of map.

Paper cut map

I really want to work with recycled/reclaimed paper and since I recently acquired a pile of large topographic maps, this is the paper I hope to work with going forward with the paper cuts. I really like the combination of materials and design, and the paper the map is printed upon is fairly decent to work with.

Work-In-Progress Paper Cut

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Last week I mentioned beginning work on larger paper cut work, and this is the second of the two. The paper size is approximately 19″ x 24″ and is a thinner stock than the grey paper I was working with last week to create the flower shaped paper cut.

I’m enjoying working with the basic crescent shape and having the design flow around the page. Sometimes they become tornados, then seashells, and morph into imaginary microscopic organisms.

When I’d cut away about a quarter of the paper I came close to calling it quits because it seemed like an impossible amount of surface area to work with. I was overwhelmed because I don’t normally work this large. I’ve managed to push past that phase and will obsessively cut away paper until I reach the end.