Making Friday: Papercutting at the Norval

So many Skinny laMinx designs are based on papercuts. Pincushion, Flowerfields, Rough Cuts, Stig – they all started with a sketch, some paper and a sharp little knife.

I haven’t been doing much paper cutting lately though, and I really miss it, so when I was invited to spend Garden Day 2020 in the Sculpture Garden of the Norval Foundation with 6 other artists, I thought I’d get out my paper and blades again.

As I went, I documented the process, as I thought some of you might be interested.

I sketched plants with a graphic quality, and really fell in love with the Kolkol bush (Berzelia Abrotanoides), with its close, tight stems and leaves and cute little bunches of ball-shaped flowers.

After a few sketches, I refined my impression of the Kolkol bush into a few curved lines, leaves and little dots on top. When planning a papercut, you need to constantly think about how the paper will hang together once cut, so it’s important that there are connections between all the elements.

After sticking my sketched paper to a piece of black sugar paper with a couple of bits of tape, I started by cutting the inside of the flowers, as this kind of round cutting action puts a lot of strain on the paper, so it’s best to do when there’s a lot of paper left to support it.

And then, on I go, as you see in the sequence below, cutting through the white paper and the black paper beneath, using a steeply pointed NT Cutter blade.

Eventually, once all the cuts have been made, I remove the white paper and carefully  ‘weed’ out the cut pieces to reveal the complete papercut.

Thanks so much for the invitation, Norval Foundation. It was a real treat!