Tag: leaves

This cute little owl papercutting is part of my ongoing papercutting project that I started a couple of years ago. (Adapting and hand-cutting my way through the designs in “922 Decorative Vector Ornaments” by Dover Books.)

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Owl Papercutting K107

Design number 107 in the book was easy to name, for once! It’s an owl. This one took quite a few tweaks to turn it into a papercutting, mainly because the central dots of its eyes were just ‘floating’ and not connected to any other parts of the design. I needed to extend the feathery outer bits of the eyes so that the pupils could ‘hang’ from them.

This ended up as one of the neatest cuts I’ve made so far. In many of the previous cuts I’ve said “what a shame I didn’t tidy up the cut before I photographed it”…

… but I seem to have suddenly realised that there is nothing stopping me doing the tidying! So instead of leaving any ragged bits and bobs I snipped them off before I took the photo. Duh.

Closer up:

There were lots of little curved lines in this cut, but the scalpel did a pretty good job.

Even up close I like it.

While I was cutting it I was still listening to the audiobook version of Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris. I am coming round to the idea of audiobooks as a ‘productivity tool’. Sanderson’s books are normally huuuuuuge big chunky tomes, and take days to read. Being able to listen to a book while doing gardening and household chores has been a real bonus, this week.

Any comments about the design, or advice about the cutting? You can chip in via the comments page, or Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram.

I’m still working on the  papercutting project that I started a couple of years ago. (Trying to adapt and (hand-) cut my way through all designs in “922 Decorative Vector Ornaments” by Dover Books.) None of designs in the book have names – they just have numbers. I’ve called number 106 “Sunrise Flower” because it looks a tiny bit like a cross between a flower with leaves, and a sun with rays spreading out from it.

(Some of the links below are affiliate links to Amazon. If you’d like to find out what that means then please check out my policies page.)

Sunrise Flower Papercut K106

As mentioned above this week’s design is number 106 in the book (in case you want to hunt it down and cut it yourself).

It might not look like much, but it was very enjoyable to cut.

Closer up:

I think I was using a fairly new blade, so it was very easy to cut the flowing curved lines. Even the tricky delicate bits cut from the central parts of the design felt fairly easy.

Yes, up close it’s a bit asymmetrical and that thin curved line of the ‘sun’ goes a bit too thin…but that’s the difference between hand-cutting and laser-cutting these designs. The hand-cut pieces aren’t meant to be perfect – that’s what gives them their individuality and charm 🙂

I’m still using the pack of 100 scalpel blades that I bought a couple of years ago, but at some point I’ll need to get some refills. Here is a link I found to some new ones:

While I was cutting it I was listening to an audiobook version of Brandon Sanderson’s Elantris. I’m still not sure what I think of audiobooks. I definitely prefer to read physical books (or even ebooks). Partly because I like so see how names are spelled, I guess. But if I’m using my hands for something else (like crafts or chores or driving) then I love listening to podcasts because I’m still learning new stuff all the time. So audiobooks are a bit of an experiment that I’m dabbling with at the moment, instead of podcasts.

Any comments about the design, or advice about the cutting? You can chip in via the comments page, or Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn or Instagram.