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.

Colours of Love Paper Cut

Just in time for Valentine’s Day, I’ve been working on these delightful papercut crafts. I spent a lot of time working out how to age the pine frame to create an effective rustic charm. It involved hammering dents and chips into the wood, and then using a diluted wood stain to wash over the wood using an old cloth. Although its a time consuming process, I decided to do several shadow box frames at once – some smaller 5 x 5 inch frames I hope to fill and put in my etsy shop soon – and found it takes less time to do a batch than each individually!

The paper cut is made from natural brown card which reveals recycled paint charts underneath, showing a selection of charming earthy tones. Romantic-themed colour names are written underneath each heart in typewriter style lettering, and the title on the top reads ‘Colours of Love’. Since this is for sale in my etsy shop, I decided that I would make a version with the US spelling (‘Colors of Love’) and ask people to leave a note specifying which spelling they would prefer! I am so in love with this little framed paper cut I found it difficult to list it on etsy; it’s so sweet that I wanted to keep it for myself! So I had to promise myself that I would make a bigger version for my studio wall soon!

Also, I recently set up a facebook page and twitter account for my etsy shop, and welcome followers and ‘like’ers! My New Years Resolution was to keep all these social networking outlets up-to-date, and its going fantastically so far, especially since I worked out how to link the accounts together!

Laura Makabresku: Fox Photos