This is a hand-cut filigree Valentine heart papercut design I’ve been working on recently, so I can make it easier to fit the names and ‘&’ ampersand into the design:
I like this one because when it’s cut out the names don’t immeditely jump out. You have to concentrate on them a bit if you’re just looking at the overall design.
I’ve managed to cut it quite well, too – there are enough inconsistencies to made it obvious that it’s a hand-cut piece, but not so many mistakes that I’d rather have done it with the laser cutter. Having said that, I’m also going to try cutting it with the laser, to make sure that the design works at a slightly different scale. I’ll cut it from paper and then from wood. I think that on the laser it will be more successful in wood rather than paper. It might look quite delicate, but actually it seems to be surprisingly sturdy when you hang it up.
Hopefully it will be on my shop soon, or maybe on my Amazon Handmade shop. Just look out for ‘Filigree Valentine Heart papercut’. I’ll put a hand-cut and laser-cut version for sale. It takes me about 2 hours to cut by hand, so the hand-cut version will obviously be more expensive.
Today I put a short video on TikTok and YouTube (and a couple of other social media sites) comparing two papercuts. I asked, “Hand-Cut or Laser-Cut”? This is the design from a previous post, where I got ChatGPT/DALL-E to help me design a Valentine heart. I then cut it two different ways; by hand and by laser.
Here is a closer look at the two pieces. Can you tell which is which?:
(Before anyone mentions it – I realise I accidentally cut off the little heart above the doves’ heads in version 2. Oops!)
So…the one on the left is the hand-cut version:
…and here is the same section done by laser:
There is one easy way to tell them apart, without even having to look at detailed closeups. The stand-out difference is that the rightmost one is a tiny bit brown, due to smoke in the lasercutting machine. To successfully create a papercut with a laser machine, you quite often have to turn off the ‘air assist’. I might do a separate post one day on why, but the relevance here is that the smoke isn’t blown away as efficiently, so the paper goes a bit toasted.
The other main difference is usually only visible at closer range. It’s that the cutting is a bit more jagged or lumpy in some places. Having said that though, (1) it took me less than an hour to cut this one out by hand, so that explains why some parts aren’t as finished as they could be, (2) there’s nothing to stop me going back and tidying up the sharper angles if I need to.
At very close range it becomes even more obvious which is which. Lasercutting machines work by burning the paper away. So if you see (or smell!) a laser-cut piece of paper it will almost always have toasted edges. They often look like the edges of the cuts are slightly serrated, too, depending on the laser’s settings.
Compare the laser version above with the handmade version below. The image below doesn’t have the singed brown outlines on the shapes:
Which version is ‘better’?
I honestly can’t decide, because they both serve different purposes. If I want to do some relaxing, therapeutic papercutting as a hobby, then hand cutting is the way to go. But if I want to turn the artwork into a Valentine card, lasercutting is the best way to do that, otherwise I’d have to charge about £20 per card, which most people aren’t willing to pay. The laser gives me the ability to reproduce papercut artworks (in the same way that painters create prints of their works to put onto cards). So if someone wants one of my designs they can either go for the affordable version or the premium handmade version.
If you’d like to cut this design for yourself, I’ve adapted and created it as an SVG in my shop and Etsy shop.
My “An AI Made Me Do It” project continues, in 2025. This time I have used ChatGPT’s DALL-E to help me create an AI-designed Valentine heart.
Below is a link to the YouTube video below showing how I did it:
First I gave DALL-E a prompt:
“Please could you create a design for a papercut Valentine’s card? It should be made from a single sheet of white paper, with red paper in the background.”
They contain some great elements, but both are just a little bit too fiddly in some parts. So I asked the AI to make them simpler. After two more attempts of me giving it instructions, here is what ChatGPT / DALL-E came up with:
Not bad! But AI still has a problem understanding how to design for papercutting. If it’s creating a papercut then all of the design elements must be attached to at least one other element. Because of that, there are almost always a few ‘orphan’ pieces in the design. The most obvious one here is the little heart above the heads of the two doves. If I cut this design without making any changes, that heart would drop out because it’s not attached to anything.
The next stage was to convert the design to an SVG (scaled vector graphics) file. Here is an article about what SVG files are, but basically they’re an international standard of file that can be recognised by most cutting machines and printers. I usually use SVGs for my laser cutting, but in this case I was going to do a hand-cut version of the design, so why did I need to adapt it to an SVG instead of just printing out the .webp format?
Why use SVG format?
I knew I was going to try to cut it by laser after I’d cut it by hand, so would need the SVG lines to show the laser where to cut.
I wanted to make the file available to other people to download later. SVGs allow them to be able to cut it or print it on whatever printer or cutter they are using.
Even though I’d already noted that the little heart above the doves wasn’t connected to anything, unless I actually tweaked the design to show it linked to another element then there was a danger I’d forget to link it and it would then drop out of the design when I cut it.
With vector files, you can manipulate the ‘nodes’ on the vector lines so that they look exactly how you want them. This makes the design really clear. In the example screenshot and video below, I am using a program on my iPad to move the nodes of the lines so that they look just as I want them:
Once I’d created the SVG file, I could then just print it out as a line drawing, and use the lines as guides for my knife.
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 😀
Recently my mum’s friend got married, so I made a wedding heart woodcut for them. It’s a laser-cut filigree heart, personalised with the name of the bride and groom.
Here’s a YouTube video of the lasercutter (Epilog Fusion Edge) doing its thing and cutting out the wooden heart:
The design still needed a couple of tweaks at the time I took this video, but on the whole I’m really pleased with it. It would be great for Valentine’s Day, or even better for a wooden (fifth) anniversary gift. I like the flowing lines, and the way that the names fit in with the rest of the design elements. This version was a test that I did in cheap laserply wood, but the final version was more substantial and yet it still looked really delicate. I’m thinking about putting this design (although with different names, obvs) on Etsy. Maybe I’ll put it on Amazon Handmade as well. But I’ll also put it here on my shop page.
The overall wedding heart woodcut design is by me, but some of the elements came from a licence that I bought a few years ago from Vectorstock. (Here is a link back to when I explained about saving design time by using pre-existing designs.)
Recently I was asked to do a demo for Leeds Marquetry Group (LMG) on how I created marquetry jewellery. So I created a quick video demo of how to make a simple marquetry flower. The trouble with marquetry demos is that it’s difficult for a lot of people to see what you’re doing at the same time. And with miniature marquetry demos, that goes double!
(If you want to compare it with the laser-cut version of a marquetry flower that I did a few years ago, here is the link.)
So I’ve included the video here, to show what I demonstrated.
It’s definitely not perfect because it’s just a quick demo that I threw together in the space of about an hour – but I’m pleased with how snugly the wooden pieces fit together. Remember as well that the flower’s diameter is only about 14mm. So it looks worse through a magnifying glass and blown up on this screen!
My overall advice to the group was basically that there’s no magic to creating tiny marquetry designs for jewellery. You just need a cutting mat, a sharp knife, and a magnifying glass. Then just keep hacking away at the wood until it does what you want.
Even with the miniature dogs that I put into cufflinks, there weren’t any surprising hints or tips that I could give to the members of the marquetry group. I honestly just look through my magnifying glass and keep hacking tiny bits off the wood. It’s almost like carving it, but at a very small scale – until it looks like it’s the right shape.
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.
I have just been to the 20Books Sevilla conference, and it was just as inspiring as I’d expected. Before I set off, I asked ChatGPT to come up with some ideas for “author merchandise” (because I’m still on my challenge of creating 52 AI-assisted artworks during 2024.) One of the ideas it suggested was “Author merchandise for recipe book authors”, which should include “A recipe book title etched onto a wooden spoon”. So here is my interpretation below. To be honest I’m nor sure this even counts as an artwork, but I thought that authors of recipe books could put their book title on one side…
…and then they could put a QR code for their website on the other side of the spoon:
As it happens, I didn’t actually meet any authors of recipe books at the 20Books conference so I couldn’t show them my spoon-based wares, but that doesn’t really matter because I’m just doing what the AI tells me to do.
I met lots of lovely writers (even though none of them were authors of recipe books), and I also made a drunken promise commitment to another author (which I will explain more about at a later date…)
