Paper cutting technique

In today's lesson there was a workshop in paper cutting technique.

For the first piece I decided to sketch out my name in Nepalese so that I could cut out it out with a scalpel. It was a simple first attempt to get me accustomed to using a scalpel again.

For the next piece, I used a photo of a woman in traditional Gunyo Cholo. I only removed the clothing so the picture can be put on any surface and its pattern will appear as the clothes of the woman.


On the cutting mat, the dress will look like a dull green covering but this allows the model's face to stand out.
I chose to remove the dress for this piece because traditional Gunyo Cholo comes in a variety of patterns and to capture the interest of these patterns, the image can be placed on any object and the pattern will reflect on the picture as the model's dress.

Using patterns from other objects can be used when blending the influence of Minjae Lee with it. The Minjae Lee's works of portraits always contains complex yet vibrant patterns that are time consuming to create by hand. Instead of creating the pattern yourself, placing the image on a surface with hollow areas where the surface pattern will be visible can be useful when working with Minjae Lee's style.

This piece, that looks like streams of black clouds/smoke made from just cutting paper, is by Andrew Singleton.

For this work, I cut out the lotus print using a scalpel again. This is was difficult to cut out since it had lots of curves, which is hard to carve out since the scalpel had an angular preference.

For the next piece I decided to use Yan Pei Ming's portrait of Mao Zedong.

 I wanted to recreate Yan Pei Ming's brush strokes so I decided to cut out strips of paper in varying sizes to represent the varying strokes size of the artist.

I felt like there weren't enough gaps here so I made a few more afterwards.

I placed it against a light source to see it will appear differently. It wasn't much different since it was white light, it just looked like it refilled the image.

I removed more strips of paper here so that more lights pass through the paper.

I removed the background of the original work but kept a white frame around the figure. This makes the work look like a portrait taken with a 1980s style background. (Sci-Fi theme background was popular due to the Start Wars franchise)

The background was a galaxy background from a tablet.

Yan Pei Ming - Mao Zedong's Portrait

<-Yan Pei-Ming, Portrait of Mao, 1999

 Using graphite, I made a continuous line before using tones and shades on the portrait. I used landscape instead of portrait because I only wanted to draw the upper half of Mao Zedong's portrait and also fill up the paper. The graphite was hard to use because the line was quite thick and difficult to make a portrait with it. I didn't put much effort on the eyes because it wasn't the main focus, this study was to be able to recreate the portrait's outline with a continuous line in a short time.