When looking back at my past works and how my work has developed in the past year has really made me appreciate how far I’ve come in my medium and how much further I can go.
When I first began it was with quite simple cut outs, usually inspired by nature or clockwork and was always on a singular layer. I found it very difficult at the time as I had never worked within the paper cutting medium before and it took quite a while to grasp at the different papers that I could use, the different techniques available to me and also the different tools available to me.
The sharpness of my scalpel became incredibly important on how precisely I could cut out each piece, and the thickness of the paper also.
If the paper was very thin, such as newsprint at 45gsm (the thickness of the paper) which I used in some of my earlier work, then it was much more likely to tear and break even when the scalpel was incredibly sharp just because I myself could not put very much pressure on the paper.
Whereas I also experimented with very thick paper, slightly thicker than card and found that I was damaging my wrist because of the pressure I was having to exert on the paper just to get the scalpel through it, often having to cut over the same line 2 or 3 times. This blunted my scalpels much more quickly and when using disposable ones they snapped, becoming useless even if they were not blunt yet.
At the end of my first year of using the papercutting technique I was becoming very bored with the influence of nature on my paper cuts and found that concept very limiting. Through this I explored different options and found that Pattern would become my new choice as it was practically limitless on what I could create with a pattern.
I also started using Colour this year instead of staying in the Black and White niche that I had put myself into. Colour has given me an amazing platform to work from as I can convey the colour choice into my concept. Using jewel like tones to give the appearance of a more islamic inspiration, or more muted colours for a gothic inspiration.
I have also begun looking at modern architecture as inspiration as pattern is used constantly not just in the appearance of the building, but the actual design and construction of it too.
