paper art

Friday fun

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I wanted to share a quick pic of these origami elephants that I made last week for my boyfriend’s birthday. My normal creative MO is cutting paper, but I didn’t start there. Several years ago I became interested in paper art forms through trying my hand at origami. I really loved the elegance of the forms you can create through simply folding paper.

I moved on to paper cutting after seeing an exhibition in the Tate Modern by Matisse. His late work included very large organic shapes cut from large vibrantly coloured pieces of paper. To begin with I was interested in the different silhouettes I could create using bold and contrasting colours. More recently I have been exploring different textures and patterns, including using cloth that has been coated in PVA glue. My practice continues to evolve.

But now and again I try my hand at origami again to make my brain work differently. It’s more like art as a puzzle for me as I still need to follow other people’s patterns. The elephants here were folded from this lovely pattern at spruce crafts.

I also make art. You can things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying.

DIY Sould repair and ‘Womb Art’ – does anyone really want to see that?

/ The Magpie at Midnight / 4 Comments

I think I have been putting off posting this for quite some time because I’m really not sure who would want to see this kind of thing. I had been working on a little series of pieces called DIY soul repair, which had included a skull and a heart. I was thinking about a kind of gothic steam punky series that would involve bones and other bodily organs. And then I started having all sorts of tests and treatments for infertility and the series itself felt more relevant. So I felt I had to get a uterus involved. So this third piece in the series now looks like this (available on things on redbubble here).

Still F__king perfect_blue

So I was actually pretty happy with the way that turned out. But I also felt it was a bit depressing, so I took photos the white paper cutouts that I used as stencils for the red paper parts on this piece and used the outline of these to ‘cut’ other photos of papercut flowers I have to create something a bit more positive, which turned out like this (available on things on redbubble here), which I kind of like because if feels a bit cheeky and a bit more positive given the current empty state of my own uterus.

The lady garden 2 red

So I am not really sure if anyone would be into this kind of thing, but here it is, anyway. I think I kind of enjoyed making these for me anyway so I’m not bothered if no one else is interested.

I also make non uterus related art. You can things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself if you wanted to. Just saying.

Weekend work in progress

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I’ve been working on an animation for my documentary that involves some figures playing poker. Here’s a quick peek at one of the work in progress images.

I planned for the hands to be more of a mint green but didn’t have the right paper. But I think this shade works fine – I’m pretty happy with them.

Like what you see? I also make art. You can things with my designs on at my shop here. Could even treat yourself. If you wanted to. Just saying.

Work in progress – from start to finish

/ The Magpie at Midnight / 4 Comments

This is a post I have been thinking about for a while, but I haven’t quite had the time to pull everything together. It’s a kind of start to finish look at a single piece of work. So here goes….

First there is a sketch, which in the case looked like this:


The majority of my art work then basically involves me sitting for some time with sketches and and a pair of scissors. I normally end up with a kind of white silhouette in reverse of the original sketch. I really like these, I think they are really elegant in their own right and am thinking about doing some work based on these alone. Let’s see.


After this stage I use these white bits of paper as stencils for working with different kinds of coloured paper to build the final image. This results in a series of movable pieces coloured paper that I can start to place together in different ways to form the final image. With the magpies in this case I used pritt-stick just to lightly glue them together as the whole magpies were much easier to move about than the individual bits. Here is the skeleton of the magpie image.


Then I will probably add some paper flowers, which are becoming a bit of a signature feature. I have stockpiles of these. I have cut so many of these now that I can cut them free hand, without really paying too much attention, in front of the telly.

I like to back most of my images up on different kinds of cloth. This image below is backed with a white Kashmir silk scarf that I bought while on holiday with my sister in Dubia. Most of my work involves physical materials, things that I can feel and manipulate directly with my fingers. I am becoming increasingly aware of how excited I can get about different textures in my work – in this image I particularly like the contracts of the smoothness of the paper against the very delicate pattern woven into the silk. Now I take a digital photo.

Two for Joy Raw

Finally, just at the end I will jump into photoshop and do a few tweaks. For this one I very slightly brightened the photo and increased the contrast. I then added on a sepia filter to warm it up slightly, and I finally added in some text. The final image looks like this.

Two for Joy - final

Available on a range of things here at Redbubble.