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.

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.

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