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.