Summary

Etude 4

Paper Cutting Art

Statement Of Intentions

My idea for this study was to look into paper cutting art and see if I could produce a decent piece of relief 3D art by using only one standard sheet of A4 paper. Whilst you can completely remove sections of the paper you must only use one piece, therefore anything you cut could just be moved and stuck back on or formed into some other object. I wanted to make something intricate and delicate by cutting out shapes and forming them into relief areas using glue or sticky tape.

Conceptualisation Of The Work

The concept of paper art isn't a new one but I thought it would be interesting to explore. The art of using one piece of A4 paper to produce an art piece is a fascinating one and the work of artists such as Peter Callesen is amazing.
I wanted to produce something delicate and pretty but the reality of the piece I produce is that whilst it is nice it isn't delicate. My cutting knife unfortunately wasn't ideal and therefore it was very difficult to make small accurate cuts in the paper. My first attempt was mimicking the work of Peter Callesen by producing a simplistic butterfly piece, which I think was a good sound place to jump off from.
Whilst I'm not looking to produce paper cutting art in my final piece it was nice to explore and use a hands on approach for a change, without the intervention of computer based art software. It is interesting to make physical mistakes that you can't undo by pressing a button, for instance ripping the paper by accident. I think using the hands on approach and combining it with the digital world gives a very successful 3D hybrid.
There was no target audience in mind when I set about this project, however I guess on some level it would appeal to anyone that likes art and crafts, the skills could be used very successfully towards producing handmade birthday card or Christmas cards.
I think the only thing that I would do in future if I were to produce anything like this again would be to use a good small cutting knife and thin cardboard instead of paper, I found personally that the paper ripped too easily, maybe I'm a little heavy handed!
As far as technology is concerned I did really explore this area, however, I think it would have been interesting to try and do a piece on a 3D software application like Maya, constructing a relief object from a single plane. I think the best course of action would have been to capture each stage of construction and replay it as moving footage so you could see the object coming alive and morphing out from the page.

Documentation of Technical and Artistic Process

See blog entries below

Technical Analysis

See blog entries below

References

http://www.beatricecoron.com/links.htm

http://www.papercutters.info/SA/ByName/Gomez_Linda/index.php

http://trudykauffman.papercutters.info/SA/ByName/Kauffman_Trudy/Kauffman.htm

http://www.cut-it-out.org/fine/index.htm

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/862-kirigami-the-art-of-folding-and-cutting-paper

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirigami

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_paper_art

http://www.pgannon.com/

http://photowebs.blogspot.com/2008/03/3-dimension-paper-cutting-art-magic.html

http://www.petercallesen.com/

How Successful Is The Etude?

I very much enjoyed the study of paper art and I'm amazed at the type of thing that can be made from the a very simple and plain starting point. Whilst I need to hone my knife skills, my visualisation methods and brainstorming ideas, it is a very interesting way of working. You have to think differently in order to work out which pieces you can cut and pull out and which areas would look better flat, it's quite technical. You have to change your thinking in such a way that you're deconstructing shapes into basic parts, for instance when you flatten out a cube you are left with a cross shape. I think the pieces of art that I did look very effective in the photographs and I think with much more practice I might even start making home-made birthday and Christmas cards. It is nice to keep things simple. I think if I had more time and was looking to take this into my final project I would probably look more towards the software route using Maya as a method of going one step further, therefore adding an element of animation by flapping the butterfly wings or animating the rolling up of the paper curls.

Paper cutting

I thought of one final idea so I did it to see what it looked like. I know it uses two pieces of paper instead of one but I quite like the effect.

Paper Art

I've done a piece that is simple but I like it, I think it's interesting and effective. I have used red paper underneath and to form a border around the white paper. I found in the end that the heavier paper of 115gsm was a bit better for cutting with my less the ideal blunt blade. I decided to do the butterfly cut out in a different way to the previous attempt and the method I have used is to effectively cut the butterfly down the middle and fold the pieces back on themselves and glue them, therefore giving them more height off the paper.
Anyway here's the piece I have made, the only thing I might change is the colour underneath I might try different ones and see what looks the best on the photographs.






I've changed the colour background and border to green and I think I prefer it, pictures below:-

Paper Cutting Practice 2

As mentioned in the previous post I thought I'd explore flowers to see how effective a simple flower is. I think the piece doesn't look great, but it's only practice I guess. It's quite an interesting way of thinking to produce art this way, trying to think which parts are safe to cut in order to not detach them from the paper. Trying to glue the tiny little pieces together is also a challenge.
Anyway here are the pictures of my second attempt, I think they're a little messy even in the photos.

Paper cutting practice

I thought that I might have a paper cutting practice, just to see what I can create. I took the simple idea from the Peter Callesen web-site of a few butterflies cut from white paper. What a nightmare, I can't believe that anyone can produce anything as delicate as some of the pieces he has done. My cutting knife isn't very delicate so that's part of the problem, I know you can get pen sized cutting implements which would probably be a lot better for this sort of thing. Anyway here's a few pictures of the piece that I've done. The reality is that the physical piece of work looks like a bit of a mess and the photographs look fairly good. Here are some pictures:-





I think that I will practice some more, practice makes perfect after all. I like the butterfly theme and I think flowers may work reasonably effectively. Let's see what I come up with.

Paper cutting and folding art

I've just discovered that there are many different countries that produce art using paper cutting and/or folding, known as Kirigami. It's difficult to know which country did this first but here are some links to a variety of different nationality paper artists.

http://www.beatricecoron.com/links.htm

http://www.papercutters.info/SA/ByName/Gomez_Linda/index.php

http://trudykauffman.papercutters.info/SA/ByName/Kauffman_Trudy/Kauffman.htm

http://www.cut-it-out.org/fine/index.htm

http://www.37signals.com/svn/posts/862-kirigami-the-art-of-folding-and-cutting-paper

Again there is a wikipedia page which explains a little about Kirigami

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirigami

Paper cutting art

I found various paper cutting art on the internet in my travels, I wanted to see what is out there. Origami is the first idea that springs into my mind when thinking about paper art, however I found an interesting article on Wikipedia which talks about the history behind Chinese paper cutting art which again is a different type of thing.

Here is the link:-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_paper_art

I have also found a web site with an artist who specialises in paper cutting art. Below is a link to the site along with some pictures of the work.

http://www.pgannon.com/


http://www.pgannon.com/pgannon_socialgrooming.htm


http://www.pgannon.com/pgannon_rainkoi.htm

I think these look amazing and again it's a very different type of thing to the A4 paper cut art and the Chinese paper cut art.

Here's another link to an artist who uses paper cutting as art form:-

http://photowebs.blogspot.com/2008/03/3-dimension-paper-cutting-art-magic.html

I'd love to do anything like this, I might start practising and see how I do!