Valentine Heart and Fairytale Papercuts

It’s been such a wonderfully busy week in the lead up to Valentine’s Day, but I’ve finally found time to finish off some papercuts and upload them to this blog and to my etsy shop. The first follows along the Valentines theme, with a decorated heart and the delicately cut words ‘You Make My Heart Sing’. I am very fond of the two little birds in this, and the ornate decoration took such a long time to perfect! When designing papercuts, it’s really important to make sure the lines are all connected so that it doesn’t ‘fall apart’ once you begin cutting. I quickly found a good way to work this out is to draw the image in pencil, then go over it in pen, checking all the joins. It sometimes takes a little while for your eyes to adjust to which bit is being cut out, so I usually scribble a pencil shading on the cut out bits if I keep getting confused! The image is then scanned into my computer and printed out on thin printer paper, and attached to a piece of card so that printer paper acts as a guideline for where to cut the card. It’s really useful to masking tape it to a self healing cutting mat to stop them sliding around as you cut!

The second is inspired by all the fairytales I’ve been reading lately, and features a fairytale scene with an elegantly written ‘Believe’ across the page. I spent such a long time picking out coloured card for backing, and eventually decided on a lovely light blue shade which always reminds me of the painted illustrations in old fairy story books.

I really love the imperfections that come from hand cutting paper, but I wanted to be able to sell multiples of these at a reasonable price in my etsy shop. I decided to compromise, by hand cutting both of the designs and cutting electronically cut duplicates for my shop. I am hoping to have many more papercuts availible soon, as I enjoy the process of designing and making them so much!

Girl on a Swing Papercut

I’ve been playing around with papercuts a lot these days. This latest one reminds me of Victorian children’s stories and the power of the imagination. It features a beautiful illustration of a young girl on a swing, which is pulled forwards from the children’s story text in the background, creating a 3D effect as if she is swinging out of the book. Since she swings from the tops of the ropes, the piece is quite delicate, but the glass in the frame protects her from harm.

The cut itself is a continuous line, nowhere near as complicated as the paper cuts I was making last week, but the 3D aspect adds extra depth and the design means I’m able to make a few to sell in my etsy shop, without the price raising because of the time it takes to make. The paper cut is made from aged off-white card which reveals natural brown card underneath, and framed in a charmingly distressed shadow box frame, which creates a lovely old style which features in some of my other paper cuts. The Colours of Love papercut below is larger and uses the same colour scheme, and has recycled paint charts showing through the cut card. Both of these are now for sale in my etsy shop.