Papercut (mis)adventures

Now I've got my flat largely sorted - and now that I'm paying a mortgage - my mind has been on what arty crafty things I might be able to make to sell, both for the love of the game and to make a few extra pounds.

I thought of papercut art, which something I used to do a fair bit of a few years ago. I made them for sale in the Artist Open House scheme which is part of Brighton Fringe Festival every year, when I was involved in one of those. Happily they sold well enough I really don't have any examples left. Unhappily between this being pre-smart phone and me always being bad about these things, I dion't have much of a photographic record either.

Later, when I was designing at Waterstones, I did some posters that like almost all my work there were created digitally but made to look like they were papercut art.

It was one of my favourite suites. These posters looked great in shop windows - which was just as well as this happened to be the Spring 2020 suite and they ended up staying in windows for a long, long time, as well as turning out to be my last seaonal suite.

Well, I'd always wondered if the papercut design I'd digitally created here were atually physically possible - i.e. each sheet of coloured paper being cut in a continuous spiral.

It actually wasn't really possible in the digital version. Adobe Illustrator can't cope with the idea of objects being in front something in one place and behind in another. So in these posters I've had to hide the joins to make separate layers look like a continuous piece of paper. See the objects coming in from the top right on each poster - bird on the right-hand example and owl on the left-hand one - that's what they're doing.

But with actual paper, I couldn't quite see why you wouldn't be able to you should be able to really do it.

You couldn't have the kind of overlaps I have here. For instance the rabbit on the left hand example is sut from the white layer but also sitting over uncut white - physically impossible. But avoid that and you should be OK... right?

So I created a design. I returned to a favourite subject of mine, which is Glastonbury Festival.

I coloured the three separate sheets for the sake of my sanity here, though my intention was to use three pieces of white watercolour paper for the exectution.

So if each colour is a single sheet of paper, you can see how nowhere is any one colour crossing itself.

Next I separated the design out into three print guides, and flipped them so I could print them onto the reverse of the paper I wanted to cut:

This was in itself a bit of a painstaking process, but the results were encouraging. There were plenty of fiddly parts but actually nothing seemed too bad considering the very complex effect of the overall design.

Pausing only to buy a new printer and carry it two miles home (my legs as well as my neck ache this weekend), I printed them out on normal paper and got to cutting a test.

Well after some intital doubts as I struggled to work out how to weave the three separate pieces together to form the right order of layers, I realised to my surpise and delight that it did in fact work. You could do the spiral thing with real paper!

... What I had yet to learn is that you shouldn't.

Long story short, I got working on the full version of the design. The cutting was painstaking but after an hour or two I had my pieces.

After all the cutting and assembling - what I had assumed would be the hard part - came the hard part.

The idea was always to work to put this into as deep a frame as I could find. I remember now that this one of the issues that held me back in doing more papercut art before - the difficulty of finding 'shadowbox' frames with a nice deep space between front glass and back board where you could fit several layers to create the desired recessing effect.

Things have only got worse in that department. Increasingly the 'glass' of anything but pretty expensive frames is now plastic, which feels too cheap for containing original artwork. But I had to hand an old Ikea Ribba frame, which is of a quality sadly even the Swedish giants can't be relied upon for any more.

It's picture dimensions are 15.5 x 18 cm, and the interior depth is about 2.5.

But of coure the paper didn't want to recess back which each concentric circle a little further back than its surround. It wanted to flop and sag.

Fair enough - I was going to have to do what I'd do for any paper cut and have spacers tucked behind the designs, holding everything where it should be.

Except in a normally layered papercut I have plenty of hidden card I can attach this structure to without it being visible from the front. Here the entire point was that were was barely any excess card - the layers barely covered each other.

Plus in a normal, layered papercut it;s easy to separate layers while you work on these things before reattaching them. Here I had to try and get in all this structural stuff with the incredibly giddly and delicate layers entangled with one another.

It was nigh on torture. Here's a shot of the back, not even finished at this point (for reference I used sheet foam as my spacer material):

It looks like some fiendishy complicated clockwork. All those curly ribbon things on the left are double-sided tape backing.

And this is how it looked altogether (though still missing a few bits and bobs here:

And I do think it looks great. I'm not being self-deprecating when I say this was a journey in discovering why not to do something. My point is that this doesn't look any better than a papercut done using the much easier approach of having normal layers. The concentric circle aspect of the design is nice but could be achieved much easier and arguably more attractively with simple layers. The novely of the art being cut from continuous pieces of paper isn't at all clear from looking at it.

(And if I'm honest in the end I did have a couple of cheats anyway. Most notably, I didn't quite like how Glastonbury Tor was sitting at the back so I cut it free and respositioned it.)

I decided it was a shame to put the backing board in and fully close it all in, that it lost a lot of its sharm. So I backed the frame instead with thick card, with a circular window cut in it and then 'glazed' with thin paper that would let the light through. Thus set against a lamp or window, the light comes through rather nicely:

So a piece of art I think came out looking good while also being a largely failed proof of concept.

I say 'largely' because I haven't thrown out the spiral thing completely. I think ti could look really good with a much simple design which keeps the spiral shape purer. Picking up instead on the text element of those original posters maybe - letters cut out, not disrupting the smooth lines of the spiral itself.

And while letters can of course be fiddly (and you've got to come up with a solution for what to do with the counters (i.e. the middle space) of letters like 'O' and P', the cutting aspect would be no harder than what I had to do here and crucially the construction phase should be a lot easier with the basic shape of the pieces being smooth and regular.