Many thanks to Barnsley College, for inviting me to have a stall at their Christmas fair this week. I met lots of lovely students and staff, and since then I’ve been working on getting orders ready for their personalised wooden Christmas baubles.
Here is the latest bauble that I’ve cut so far today:
… and this is me boxing it up, ready to send off this afternoon. (Woo, get me with my TikTok ‘boxing-up’ videos!)
This is the latest piece I’ve been commissioned to make – a ‘new baby’ keepsake gift. It’s a laser-cut wooden heart with the baby’s name and date of birth, and I’ve also spelled out the baby’s name in the little wooden blocks. The customer who commissioned it requested “NO STORKS!”, so I’ve created a stork-free design:
(No idea why there are fuzzy bits in the image. Maybe I need to clean the phone’s camera lenses. Anyway, you get the idea.)
I tried to incorporate lots of baby-themed elements but without being too sickly sweet. See how many you can spot! (Did I miss any traditional baby-related themes? You can use the comments section below to let me know what I should add next time.)
(And is it just me, or does that dummy look like it’s got eyes and a smiling mouth?!)
I like the filigree-type feel of this design. It feels a bit more special and delicate than just etching a design or message onto a solid sheet of wood.
I think it also has elements in common with some of my other work, like the wedding heart woodcut
That wedding heart is now on my TikTok shop, but I still need to upload the new baby keepsake gift woodcut to the TT shop.
As mentioned yesterday, I am currently (03 November 2025) at the Author Nation conference in Las Vegas.
Today was a bit of a run-up to the actual event, so that provided a great chance to ease into it. I registered then snagged a pen, notebook, and a lovely blueberry muffin:
Then in the evening there was a drinks reception (no photos available, to protect the innocent).
During the day I also had my author headshot taken, so I’m looking forward to seeing the result when they email the photo later…
I’m in Las Vegas this week, for the Author Nation conference (which evolved from the ’20 Books to 50k’ conferences). This is from their ‘About Us’ page:
We believe successful authors are built, not born. Our mission is to empower writers to thrive in the golden age of content creation by fostering connections with industry experts, peers, and readers.
That fits exactly with what I need: to continue to build my business (both the writing and the craft sides of it), and to learn more about:
building my business brand
creating great products
advertising the great products
selling the products through various outlets
The conference hasn’t even started yet, but I know it’s going to be incredibly useful for me as an ‘indie creative’. Although my writing has had to take a back seat to many other life-y things over the last few years, I realised the other day that I’m actually a ‘five-figure creative’ already. (Thanks, Amazon Handmade!) I’m hoping that Author Nation 2025 will boost my knowledge and motivation so much that I’ll continue to creep toward 6-figure status.
In the meantime I’ve been for a swim in the pool at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower!
Following on from yesterday’s papercut Valentine heart design, I have now cut the same design, to get a filigree Valentine heart woodcut:
Here is a YouTube video of me cutting it with the laser machine (an Epilog Fusion Edge).
I’m really pleased with how these look – either as papercuts or from wood, and at small or large scale.
In fact, I’m so pleased with the design that I’m going to put it for sale on my shop. Woohoo! Or rather, Woo Commerce!
While cutting this I was listening to the audiobook of Joanna Penn’s newly-released “How to Write Non-Fiction” (second edition). There are a LOT of useful tips in there, which I will hopefully be putting into practice later this year. I am feeling very creative at the moment, and so 2025 seems like I might be able to plan ahead far enough to actually start achieving some goals.
I’ve got loads of projects and designs that I’m working on, so I hope they all turn out as well as this design. This is what the filigree hearts look like when they’ve been cut out and are hanging up on a wall:
Do you like the design? Could I improve it? Let me know in the comments below!
For people who don’t like the yucky sentiments of standard Valentine’s Day cards, here is an experimental version of a non-mushy Valentine card. This is another laser-cut card, cut by my Epilog Fusion Edge machine.
It’s got all of the twiddly filigree bits of a laser-cut card, but without the saccharine sentiment 🙂
Although now that I think about it, I didn’t put any particularly sweet sentiments on my personalised letter ‘A’ card, either. Maybe I’ll try to come up with a non-heart version next, to make it as unsentimental as possible. That would be the ultimate non-mushy Valentine card 😀
As mentioned previously, I’ve declared that one of my creative goals for 2024 is to create at least 52 AI assisted/inspired artworks this year, using AI-generated images as a prompt for actual physical creative pieces. My most recent piece is a Yorkshire Rose card.
Using ChatGPT’s DALL-E, I gave it a prompt:
Please try to create a papercut greetings card of a Yorkshire Rose.
This is what it came up with on the first attempt:
As usual, my first reaction was “WOW”. But then my follow-up reaction was the realisation that:
1) these designs wouldn’t be very easy to recreate as physical objects, and
2) they were just white roses, rather than actual Yorkshire roses.
…so I had to try to teach DALL-E what a Yorkshire Rose was:
Thanks – those are lovely but they are just white roses rather than specifically Yorkshire roses. The Yorkshire rose is a traditional emblem of Yorkshire in the UK. It is usually shown as having 5 white inner petals and 5 white outer petals – usually with leaves in between the 5 outer petals. It is similar to a Tudor rose, but with all-white petals instead of some petals being red.
Here are the results:
Now we were getting somewhere! For some reason I wanted to create a card that actually said “Yorkshire” on it. So I asked DALL-E to include “Yorkshire” under the rose emblem. This fifth attempt was OK, but again would have been difficult to directly create as a physical card…
…but the sixth attempt was excellent (with – of course – the exception being that DALL-E mis-spelled the only word I’d asked it to include):
Bingo! I instantly loved this design, but there was still a lot of work to do before I could cut it out:
Obviously I needed to correct the spelling.
Some areas wouldn’t work as papercuts because they weren’t attached to any other parts of the card, so I needed to adapt them.
Because of the shadows in the image, I would need to create the image as several layers.
Creating the physical design
This time I opened the Linearity Curve image software, and drew lines around the elements of the design so I could create an SVG file to cut with my laser cutter. I cut it with the laser because I thought I might not be accurate enough if I did it by hand.
Here is the original image on the left, with my physical version of the card on the right:
How well did DALL-E follow my prompts?
As mentioned above, the AI image generator initially didn’t know what a Yorkshire Rose was. However, once I’d explained the concept it did an amazing job… although then it let itself down again by mis-spelling a specific word. The papercut element was great, though. So on the whole I’ll give DALL-E 8/10.
How close is the physical version to the original AI design?
I’m going to give myself 83%. The differences are:
I changed “YORKSHHIRE” to “YORKSHIRE”
I had to link some of the ‘orphaned’ design elements to other parts of the design so that they wouldn’t fall out when I cut them.
I couldn’t get the shadows/lighting the same as in the original image. (Some of the shadows seem difficult/impossible to achieve in the physical version, so I didn’t make too much of an effort trying to get them exactly right.)
To get the right-looking thickness of paper I had to use watercolour card rather than paper, but that’s got a bit more of a creamy colour than the bright paper of the original image.
The laser made brown marks on the edges of the card, so again I haven’t been able to match the brightness of the original image.
Elements where I just left the AI design and didn’t make any changes:
The shapes of the leaves and the rose.
The shapes of the individual letters.
Lessons learned
When making a layered papercut, even if the pieces have already been cut out by laser it can still take a long time to position the pieces correctly so they can be glued into place.
(Solution to point (1) above:) If it’s tricky to position the layers of designs on top of each other, etch the positions onto the backs of the other paper pieces. For example, I etched the outline of the leafy piece onto the back of the large rose piece. This made it much quicker to accurately glue the leaves into place.
Things I still need to learn or improve
Is there a quicker way to automatically (but accurately) convert the JPG image into SVG shapes? I tried to use Curve’s ‘Autotrace’ function, but it wasn’t very accurate so I decided to draw around most of the shapes by hand (using an Apple pencil).
If I get chance later, I might try to match the shadows more accurately, and maybe also try to cut from a thinner, whiter paper or card.
Homework:
Create a specific Barnsley version of the card/artwork.
Create a version with no text.
Try to cut from thinner, whiter paper/card.
Thanks for reading this post. If you’ve got any suggestions of prompts or projects – or if you’ve been experimenting yourself with AI-assisted images – I’d love to hear about them. You can either comment below or send me a message via the Contact form.
Continuing with my ongoing project of “An AI made me do it”, this latest mission was a great excuse to use AI to generate an image that I could then turn into a physical object. I needed a birthday card for my dad, and I wondered if AI would be able to help me. Normally I like to do papercut cards for family and friends, so this project became “Papercut birthday card for my dad”.
I logged into ChatGPT/DALL-E, and gave it the prompt:
As a first attempt, I thought this was amazing. DALL-E even added an envelope! I was impressed that most of the design could actually work as a papercut. There were very few isolated elements that would fall out if they were cut exactly as shown. However, there was a confusing section near the middle of the design where two elements were layered together (the snail or spiral on top of a flower shape).
At the same time, DALL-E also created this card…:
…which I would have immediately tried to cut out – if only it didn’t very clearly say “THUD” right in the middle. What on earth?!
So having discovered that DALL-E knew what a papercut birthday card looked like, I gave it another prompt:
“Great! Please could you include some little light aircraft in the image?”
At first sight these were amazing again, but:
they both had non-standard spellings of “Birthday”,
The left card was almost impossible to turn into a card without a lot of work,
Most of the planes didn’t look feasible as 2D paper objects.
Try, try again…
As usual, just when I thought that the AI was going to produce a fantastic result with the next image, we ended up having a fight instead. It either mis-spelled words (including “Dad”!), or presented the image at a sloping distorted angle, or came up with a design that would be impractical as a papercut.
Also as usual, the designs were nearly right, not really right. Here are some of the rejects:
In the end I just had to pick one that looked possible to cut without many adjustments:
I printed it out on a normal piece of printer paper, then used that printout as a cutting template.
Here is the hand-cut version that I produced first:
…but then I continued to work on a laser-cut version. To do that I used Linearity Curve, which has an ‘auto trace’ function. Auto trace converts JPG files (i.e. photos) into vector graphics (i.e. collections of flat shapes). Auto trace sometimes makes little errors with the shapes (but is still way faster than tracing around the images by hand), so afterwards I edited the nodes of the vector shapes to try to get them to match the original image a bit better:
(The little white dots on the plane are nodes that can be moved around.)
…and here is the physical laser-cut version (on the right), next to the original AI design:
How well did the AI follow my prompts?
I would say about 8/10, for this project. Very successful! Most of the designs looked like papercut birthday cards. And all of them (when requested) contained light aircraft. However – as mentioned several times before in this ongoing series of projects – creative spelling was the opposite of useful or helpful.
How close is the physical version to the original AI design?
I’m going to say it’s about 85%. The differences are:
I didn’t cut out all of the sections that were cut out in the original design – I just etched them instead.
I changed the tail section because if I’d cut it out then lots of the pieces would just have dropped out. (Also, the stripe extends forward from the tail, which doesn’t look quite right.)
Some of the swirly bits have been simplified.
I couldn’t find any dark green card or paper to mount the plane on, so I chose a speckled dark blue piece instead.
The letters in the “Happy Birthday” banner had to be converted into stencil-type letters (otherwise the central sections of the As, Ps, B, D and R would have dropped out).
The elements where I just left the AI design and didn’t make any changes:
The outline of the plane
The design of the banners.
Lessons learned
ChatGPT is great at papercut birthday card designs.
Things I still need to learn or improve
Actually I’m pretty pleased with this project. Even the ‘duds’ had lots of elements in them that I felt could be used in future projects.
Homework:
Convert at least three of the AI’s original designs into actual cards.
Thanks for reading this post. If you’ve got any suggestions of prompts – or if you’ve been experimenting yourself with AI-generated images – I’d love to hear about them. You can either comment below or send me a message via the Contact form.
Continuing with my project “An AI Made Me Do It“, I’ve continued to put AI to practical uses by creating physical artworks from AI-generated images. This time I used Kittl to create an 80th birthday card for my mum.
I wanted to do a papercut artwork for the front of her card, but wasn’t sure if the AI would know what a papercutting design should look like, so I tried suggesting an adult colouring page design:
Prompt: “Adult colouring page of a number ’80’. The numerals should be filled with doodles of simple white roses.”
With Kittl you can choose from a set of styles, so I selected “anime vector”, and this was its first attempt:
I thought this was great, but wondered if the AI could keep the floral elements inside the boundaries of the actual numbers. So I used exactly the same prompt again (but not the anime vector style), to see if the design would evolve or if I needed to tweak the instructions. However, see if you can spot the problem with the next few designs…
Artificial “Intelligence”?
They were no good for an 80th birthday card! This is another example of AIs being too “creative” with text. It’s a shame because they were lovely designs – but obviously they were impossible to use because they said “88” instead of “80”.
For a while I tried to generate just the “0” shape by itself, in case I could match any of the designs with the previous 8s, to get the whole figure “80”:
…but none of them seemed to match exactly, so I went back to trying “80” again, with this prompt:
“Papercutting design of a number ’80’, where the 8 and 0 are filled with doodles of simple white roses.”
This time Kittl nailed it first time. (I’d forgotten to select the Anime vector style, but it still did an amazing job):
Cutting it out
I definitely felt I could cut that out by hand. So I printed it (on normal printer paper) and then over the space of three evenings I used an X-Acto knife/scalpel to cut the design. This is the result:
Here is Kittl’s original design on the left, with my papercut on the right.
All the years of doing my “922 Decorative Vector Ornaments” project must have paid off! Because technically speaking, this is one of the best papercuts I’ve done. There were very few errors, and the cuts were clean and sharp. I’ve always loved doing papercuts and I’m a member of GAP (Guild of American Papercutters (- there isn’t a guild of British papercutters)) and this was a great excuse to use my cutting skills.
How well did Kittl follow my prompt?
Right from the start it came up with some great rose designs. I think it helped that I started with the Anime vector style, because by definition this needs to use clear lines and shapes, rather than gradients of colours.
As usual though, there was a point where the AI got too creative. This time it kept giving me the number 88 instead of the number 80. (I am begining to think that the “I” bit of “AI” does not mean “intelligent”.)
After I had a break then went back to a similar prompt, Kittl came up with a design that I felt was immediately usable. It is really rare for me to see an AI-generated design that feels 100% right, but this one not only followed the prompt but also looked like the design I had in my imagination.
How similar is my end physical product, compared with the original AI-generated design?
I reckon it’s about 95% the same (if you ignore the fact that I put it on blue card instead of beige). The camera angle of the finished card makes it look a little bit distorted, but the papercut is the same size and shape as the original image (I was cutting it out directly from a printout of the design). I’ve suggested the final 5% difference because Kittl put shadows behind the numbers, as if the 8 was hovering a couple of millimetres above the 0. But because I just cut it as a single piece and then stuck it onto a windowed card, mine didn’t have the shadow effect.
Lessons learned
Kittl seems to be naturally great at creating colouring pages and/or papercutting designs.
Currently (April 2024) AI image generators still have a problem with producing the exact text from a prompt.
Things I still need to learn or improve
One of these days I should really come up with a better overall design for the cards that I put my papercut artworks onto (or into, in the case of pop-ups). On the other hand though, I suppose having such a simple overall design means that viewers have to focus on the papercutting itself.
Homework:
Develop this design as a lasercutting file.
Try to mount the laser-cut artwork on a piece of beige card, to see if I can get it to look even more like the original design.
Create more papercut number cards using Kittl.
See if any of the other AI image generators can produce similar (or better) results for papercut cards.
Summary
For me this felt like a great practical use of an AI text-to-image generator. I needed an original design for a special occasion, and in minutes the AI – Kittl, in this case – created a design that would have taken me maybe a few hours to produce myself. As a result, ‘all’ I had to do was the cutting of the artwork (which of course took a few hours, but it was for a very special occasion so I wanted to put a lot of effort into it).
Thanks for reading this post. If you’ve got any suggestions of prompts or projects – or if you’ve been experimenting yourself with AI-generated images – I’d love to hear about them. You can either comment below or send me a message via the Contact form.
As mentioned earlier , I’ve declared that one of my creative goals for 2024 is to create at least 52 AI assisted/inspired artworks this year, where I’ll use AI-generated images as a prompt for actual physical creative pieces. This latest project is a real departure from my usual work. Instead of featuring lasercutting or polymer clay, this one involves creating a rose-and-skull fabric design. I didn’t think it would be horribly difficult. I was wrong.
For this project I had a very clear image in my mind of the end result that I wanted. I was aiming for a design made up of large white roses (specifically Yorkshire roses, if possible) and small white skulls. However, my first problem (learned from experience) was that most AIs didn’t seem to know what a Yorkshire rose was. (Have a look on the Wikipedia page for more info, but basically it’s a symbol with particular historical and geographical links.) Yorkshire is a region in the North of England, and its heraldic symbol is a white rose like this:
I’m from Yorkshire so that’s why I wanted a white rose. As for the skull; that was firstly because I often like to have memento mori reminders of mortality around me, to remind me to enjoy (or at least appreciate) life while I can. Secondly it was because my sister used to have a cool scarf that looked like a flowery design from a distance, but up close it was full of skulls. So I wanted to play with that surprise-skull idea.
This was my first attempt at a design, using Adobe Firefly and the prompt of: “Seamless repeating pattern of large Tudor Roses and small human skulls”:
(I used the phrase “Tudor rose” rather than “Yorkshire Rose” because I thought the AI might be more familiar with the term, but obviously it wasn’t.) Some parts of this design were amazing, such as the repeating pattern, and the overall look of the skulls and the roses). Some parts were disappointing, though – e.g. instead of big roses and little skulls it had big skulls and litte roses. Not bad for a first effort, though.
But when I tried to refine the image to get it closer to what I wanted, Firefly stopped cooperating. I went through about 40 iterations of attempting to get it to produce an image with large roses and small skulls, where it was continually ignoring the part about skulls. Example below shows that I even gave it a reference image in addition to the prompt, “Seamless repeating pattern of large Yorkshire Roses and human skulls, on a sage-coloured background. (A Yorkshire Rose is a traditional emblem of the county of Yorkshire in the UK. It typically features five petals, with small, green leaves visible between each petal. It is similar to a Tudor Rose, but all of its petals are white)”:
This is yet another example of when AIs go rogue. Firefly was simply refusing to create any skulls. So I had to give up with Firefly and try Kittl instead.
Kittl created some pretty good roses and skulls, but couldn’t create seamless repeating patterns:
…so I tried ChatGPT/DALL-E. That image generator produced tons of fantastic roses and skulls, but again was completely incapable of producing a seamless repeating design:
By this time I’d spent several hours trying to force the various AIs to come up with a seamless repeating design of large white roses and small white skulls. The different image generators could EITHER create a repeating pattern OR create a pattern of roses and skulls. So in the end I had to give up bashing my head against a brick wall and come to a compromise. I had to take my favourite image and ‘manually’ manipulate the size of the roses and skulls so that they were the right proportions. Then I had to manually adjust the elements of the image so that they formed a seamless repeating pattern.
One day I may create another post showing in detail how to create a repeating pattern, but briefly I used Linearity Curve to create ‘masks’ of the individual elements of the design, so that I could later change their sizes and positions:
Original image (bottom left), then I isolated each element (top left) and removed their backgrounds (top right).
I felt like this manual alteration was cheating, because the AIs hadn’t been able to do exactly what I wanted. But as with so many of my other projects there came a time when I had to recognise how much time I’d already spent trying to get the perfect image, and to just relax and tell myself that the technology wasn’t quite ready for me yet. It was so frustrating, though! I knew that AIs could create seamless repeating patterns, because Firefly had been creating loads of them for me. And I knew that AIs could create roses and skulls together. So why couldn’t they just do what I asked?!
Anyway, I had to just suck it up and do some final bits of image manipulation myself, to get the image I’d been hoping for. This was what I ended up with:
Creating the physical object
Having finally created my repeating pattern of large roses and small skulls, I could move onto the next stage of the project. That was to create a physical object from the design.
I thought I might try to use Redbubble to create an actual physical object. Here is their mockup of what my design would look like if it was turned into a backpack:
I’m still tempted to do that, actually. Maybe when my current backpack dies.
…but eventually I chose to have it printed on plain cotton fabric. I used Maake.com. I was so excited when the fabric arrived:
Here’s more of a close-up view:
The roses and skulls are exactly how I wanted them: you just notice the roses from a distance, but then from closer up you can see the little skulls. The only disappointing thing was that there wasn’t enough difference between the shades of blue. Never mind though – I’m sure I can find a use for this fabric. Maybe that will be another whole project. In the meantime – mission accomplished! An AI assisted physical object of rose-and-skull fabric.
How well did the AI(s) follow my prompts?
As explained above, the three AIs all managed some great individual designs but either couldn’t (in the case of creating repeating patterns) or wouldn’t (in the case of creating skulls) do what I asked. At the time of writing this post (April 2024) Kittl and DALL-E still can’t do repeating patterns. And Firefly still won’t mix roses with skulls. I’d score them all about 6/10 in their attempts to follow the prompts. Some of the images produced along the way were great, but just didn’t fully fit the brief.
Lessons learned
As usual, the technology isn’t quite ready for me yet. I thought my requirements were fairly straightforward, and yet none of the AIs were capable of doing what I wanted.
How to create repeating patterns. That was a real bonus, actually. I think it’s a skill I can use in future projects.
There are some great companies around (e.g. Redbubble, Maake) who can turn digital images into physical objects.
Things I still need to learn or improve
It would be good if I could come up with a way to tell when I’m wasting time versus spending time on the projects. Failing that, maybe I should just set a timer for working on the AI design phase of the project. ChatGPT/DALL-E helps with that, because after a while it stops and says I need to come back in X hours. Kittl and Firefly have ‘token’ systems instead, where you can only ask for a certain number of images.
Apart from that, in general I just need to keep my eyes and ears open for updates in the AI text-to-image generators, to know when I’ll finally be able to ask the AI to create a seamless repeating pattern of large white roses and small human skulls on a green or blue background.
Homework:
Now I need to make something out of the fabric!
Summary:
This unexpectedly turned out to be a monster of a project. I had to fight the AIs all the way to try to get them to create repeating rose-and-skull patterns. In the end I just had to compromise by doing some of the design work myself. However I was really pleased with the end result of the rose and skull fabric.
Thanks for reading this post. If you’ve got any suggestions of what I can actually make with the fabric – or if you’ve been experimenting yourself with AI-generated images – I’d love to hear about them. You can either comment below or send me a message via the Contact form.
