Paper Cut.

Handmade paper (die) cut card on saa (mulberry) paper made by the hearing impaired here in Thailand.

When I left home at 21 to live on my own, I could hardly cook. Over time, I became rather a good cook learning to refine my skills while I was living in France.

My brothers are both excellent cooks. How that happened, I don't know. There is quite a bit of age difference between us, so my mother might have decided that they needed to know how to cook (and sew buttons on their shirt), or that they started, earlier than I, out of interest, but over the years we had some very good times preparing delicious meals (and eating them).

One brother likes preparing big cuts of meat and large fish. Christmas at his house often meant that something like duck or capon would be served.
My husband was a pastry chef prior to making a career move, and when the family was at our house he sometimes made impressive looking desserts. The one that stands out most of all in my mind is the Gateau de Sainte Honore, a pyramid of cream puffs, around which he spun threads of sugar.

In my cook book, where I have kept notes and recipes since I started cooking, there is one entry which is especially dear to me. In the handwriting of a 10 year old it tells how to make mayonnaise from scratch. At the time, I was totally amazed and charmed that my little brother could make mayonnaise all by himself.

Collage.

I started out drawing a bird with my brown Micron 01 pen. I had intended to keep work in my little 'art' book in sepia and earthy tones. Just seemed to be the thing, but once again color won. While working on the bird I started finding it very boring, although I did try to move away from drawing a bird from the side. Then, you know how it goes, I pasted in some postage stamps because the pages are 5" by 8", and don't allow for anything very large, and from there I grabbed a magazine and color started seeping into the work and it turned out into a little collage. I cut out half of the bird, so that its wing came free from the paper, which in my eyes, gives the impression that it is breaking free from the collage.

EDM Challenge 125 - draw a bird.

Listened to a nice little historic mystery while doing this:  
Gaius Petrius Ruso is a divorced and down-on-his-luck army doctor who has made the rash decision to seek his fortune in an inclement outpost of the Roman Empire, namely Britannia. His arrival in Deva (more commonly known today as Chester, England) does little to improve his mood, and after a 36-hour shift at the army hospital, he succumbs to a moment of weakness and rescues an injured slave girl, Tilla, from the hands of her abusive owner. Now he has a new problem: a slave who won't talk and can't cook, and drags trouble in her wake. Before he knows it, Ruso is caught in the middle of an investigation into the deaths of prostitutes working out of the local bar. A few years earlier, after he rescued Emperor Trajan from an earthquake in Antioch, Ruso seemed headed for glory: now he's living among heathens in a vermin-infested bachelor pad and must summon all his forensic knowledge to find a killer who may be after him next. Who are the true barbarians, the conquered or the conquerors? It's up to Ruso (certainly the most likeable sleuth to come out of the Roman Empire) to discover the truth. With a gift for comic timing and historic detail, Ruth Downie has conjured an ancient world as raucous and real as our own. 


.....and Audible.com is letting you download an Elizabeth Peters' book for FREE. If you like mysteries  then you will like this easy to listen to and humorous mystery book set in Egypt in Victorian times.

Just in case the picture I posted made you cross-eyed, I am posting one that was taken a little further away. 

Paper Cut Collage. Moon in Pond.

So why make things easy when you can make them hard? This project started off quite innocently. Someone had given me Mexican chocolate and I saved the wrappers. Then one evening last week I make a fish. 

I quickly draw a fish on cardstock and painstakingly stick little pieces of wrapper paper on it.
Then I decide to make a pond. Of course, I first cut the waterlily pads because that's fun to do with some cardstock I had in my stack.
As I go along I make a rippled moon and decide to make my own background. 

I realize that for the lay-out I want, I need a background sheet of 30x35 cm, so I texturize 2 Yupo pages with ink and watercolors. I have little experience with Yupo and the experience I do have does not make me grab it often (I am not a watercolorist). However, this works really well and I use a sponge brush, a sponge roller and a little natural sponge (very spongy all this) to make something that looks like water.

In order to make it look like one sheet, I cut (I use an exacto) one side of one sheet in a wave pattern; paste my Yupo sheets to a cracker box for support, and paste down the various elements.

I also paste some of the snippets that I cut out to blend the two pages in the collage adding a little more dimension. Then I discover that I cannot seem to shoot a good picture of the finished project without trying out six different ways and still not succeeding.


What did I learn?
Do not use candy wrappers in a project that will take many hours to make. 
Candy wrapper paper does not look great on a photo.
Cracker boxes give excellent support in a pinch.
Yupo is nice after all. Here is my first attempt. It makes good backgrounds and offers me new possibilities now.
I really like paper cutting. Yupo cutting might be even better because you glide right through.


I listened to "A Murderous Procession" by Ariana Franklin, downloaded at Audible.com while working on this project.

National best-selling author Ariana Franklin resumes her Mistress of the Art of Death series with A Murderous Procession. In 1176, King Henry II's daughter is set to marry the king of Sicily. But when several wedding guests are murdered during the procession, Adelia must uncover who is behind the killings and who is the killer's real target. 

Paper Cut.

I have a problem - well perhaps more than one, but I have such a broad interest in everything around me that I always find myself doing something new. It's probably what I need, or I would specialize. 
Since I bought some printed paper this whimsical cut-out just wouldn't go away till I made her.

Paper mosaic.

When a day is just plodding along, or worse than that even, when very little seems to go the way I would like it to go, then I am totally taken aback when I suddenly come across something that will just flood my head with ideas and flush out any disappointing feelings I may have.
It can be something simple. Like this morning when I saw a picture of a caterpillar, and the colors were so wild, that I immediately wanted to make a vividly colored caterpillar of my own. Recently I saw a program about fractals and there I went again, like Alice down the rabbit hole. Head spinning with inspiration.

Words, that are strung beautifully, do it to me too. 

“There is something about words. In expert hands, manipulated deftly, they take you prisoner. Wind themselves around your limbs like spider silk, and when you are so enthralled you cannot move, they pierce your skin, enter your blood, numb your thoughts. Inside you they work their magic.”
 – Diane Setterfield, The Thirteenth Tale
  

If I can't mosaic anything of scale, then why not mosaic something small and light. That is what you see in the picture. I am making paper mosaic tiles and placing them on a little wooden box. It looks like nothing this close, but when finished I will post the end result and it will look entirely different. You will see.

Kudu paper cut.

A kudu is quite easy to draw and I did this from a photo I had. I used 2 pages. Not that it matters, I have another 50 or so in my journal, but I was trying to make something using more than 2. Paper cut of grass, paper cut of the kudu head and then backed the cut with some bronze paper. Both the ears were supposed to hold the pages together but I snipped off a little too much of the one ear. Uh oh.
I was asked, "What if you make a mistake in your little journal", and my response was, "Then I make a mistake". I make mistakes all the time in life, let alone in my distraction.
I still have no name for what I do. It's not a hobby, it isn't my work. It all started out as 'practice' for the book I am making for my niece, Fleur. It was to be an album of the pictures I had of her. Then it seemed like a fun idea to enhance the album and I spent time looking at the possibilities of scrap-booking but that didn't much appeal to me. Mainly because it seemed like I was taking the easy way out, buying stickers and stamps. That's me, I never take a bloody short cut. Wish I would really. But not in this. I am enjoying trying out the different techniques and converting them into something usable for Fleur's Book. I am getting better at it too, except for ears, they get snipped off heartlessly.

Lotus flower paper cut.

I like this paper-cutting business. I like carving a rubber stamp even more, so it seems that every time I draw something it also has to be made into a stamp since I have discovered the technique.

I was recently looking at some artists' blogs and I admire the precision with which some of them work. For us amateurs 'quick and easy' seems to be the way, but although I am not really precise when I draw and paint, and am often disappointed by a smear from the back of my hand, or graphite smudges all over my page because I forget my hand rubs over the drawing, I am not interested in 'quick and easy'. If you are doing something for your enjoyment, why want to get it over with?

Still, the lotus flower was quick and easy to draw, cut out and I had read somewhere that you can enhance the edges of a cut-out with a color pencil. Well, that didn't work very well for me, so I had to color the whole paper-cut with a watercolor pencil. I just dotted the second page with the same design and voila. Quick and easy. 

2010, long awaited.

 

Such stillness on this first morning of the new year. In a journal once bought in Florence and never used, I cut "2010 Born on a Blue Moon", because it was the second full moon in a month on new year's eve. Midnight moved on quietly. A few hisses of fireworks far in the distance and the howling and barking of the coyotes in the hills. There had been warnings on the radio that firing guns into the air is against the law. Very comforting. I wonder if people who do this actually know that what goes up, must come down. On the other hand, what goes down, must come up and so we fervently hope for the economy in 2010.

Mastercarve rubber stamp.

 

I had this big block of Mastercarve just waiting to be sliced into. I used a soft pencil and drew the design on paper, turned it over and, using a bone folder, transferred the drawing onto the Mastercarve. With a Speedball lino cutter I cut away the parts I did not want to print. It was surprisingly easy and the slicing and cutting very therapeutic and relaxing. With a very old ColorBox pigment stamp pad, which still worked very well (must be 10 years old), I quickly printed up some correspondence cards which I am now off to write and get into the letterbox before the mail lady comes by. Sharing is more than half the pleasure of making things.

I have 'ColorBox - various colors' on my shopping list for when I go into town this week because I know I will be making more stamps.

Paper Cut.

My first paper cut. I made a drawing of an Acacia tree, then traced it and placed the tracing paper over dark brown Mulberry paper so that I didn't have any pencil marks on the final cut.

Bookbinding and Father's day.

Over the years I have learned many different techniques and one of them is bookbinding. This is the very first book I made and I even marbled the paper for the cover. I gave it to my father as a gift ,and he filled it with carefully drawn diagrams and technical notes which are a mystery to me except perhaps the ones about hydro culture. When he died, the book came back to me. It is nice to have something we shared, each because of our own interests.

Kirigami

I like receiving a letter in the mail. The stamps and the handwritten address, the feel of the paper and most importantly the contents make it special to me. Since email has become so popular I seldom receive any personal letters anymore. People still send Thank you cards, and birthday cards though, so not all is lost. I enjoy writing a letter and even more enjoy decorating the envelope. Usually when I am on a longer trip I will collect what comes my way and decorate the stationary and the envelope with these findings. My mother is usually the recipient of these letters. I will draw, glue and include little surprises like the dried grasshoppers I bought in Oaxaca, Mexico to share my experiences with her.

Fleur and I keep up a correspondence, thanks to Marianne, as Fleur is only 5. Fleur will draw something bright and beautiful and pen letters on the sides and little hearts, because she has practiced hearts and they are really good now. I usually send a pretty card back to her and on the inside I draw her as Petite Neige with a feather in her hair. Petite Neige is her Indian name in her nature group: Little Snowflake, because her hair is so blond.

I hardly used to draw or sketch anymore, but recently have had a very good reason to take out my tools and brushes and tap into my creativity again. I find it hard to believe that I started out as a Graphic Designer.

The card in the picture is made from a pattern, folded and cut with an exacto knife. The technique is called Kirigami. I had a lot of fun making it and I know Fleur will enjoy receiving it.