After my initial explorations into cut paper typography with the word Art a few weeks ago I decided to choose a few more words to work with. Make goes very well with Art, and after today Create will be added to the series.

To give you a sense of scale this is an 8.5″ x 11″ piece of red card stock, and the letters are between 2.25″ to 3″ high. I create the word in photoshop first, print it out and use this as a template to draw an outline of the letters. All the cutting of shapes is done freehand.

I enjoy trying to form the letters from smaller shapes. It’s actually pretty challenging because I am working so small. I think it’s an excellent exercise to refine my paper cutting technique even further.

Other than the word “Create” can you suggest other short words that would make a good addition to this series? I’m open to requests.

I’ve long admired the work of Elsa Mora, a Cuban artist living in LA who works in various mediums including paper cutting. I was looking at her website earlier this week as a way to jog my thinking on how to write about my own paper cut work, and came across her new site, Art Is A Way.

It’s a lovely little side project of creating artwork using the word Art, and she’s invited people to join her. I don’t normally have much interest in exploring typography in my own work, but the project inspired me to experiment with typography created in my style of cut paper.

I chose a font in photoshop, Tamil NM in bold, made it large enough to nicely fill an 8.5″ x 11″ page and printed it out. I used this as a template to trace the outline of the letters first and then freehand cut all shapes. It was really fun to do, and has me pondering more potential work using type.

If you’re interested in creating your own work of the word Art, check out the about page of Art Is A Way for details.