Fun With Paper

Hallooo all,

Work life has been busy of late. I recently started freelancing in-house at HarperCollins a couple of days each week doing design work in the children's department. Awesome stuff. It's nice to add some variety to my work week. But it does mean less free time for updates and random projects. Much of my painting time these days is for freelance jobs.

I did, however, have a little time in the past few months to make a few birthday cards for a couple of friends who live across the country. My camera is behaving a bit wonky right now (it may, in fact, be time for a new one...), so I only have one of the cards documented. And some of the images that I do have are only so-so.

Anywho, for the holidays, N sent me an AMAZING paper-cut chicken (which will soon be hanging in my kitchen), and inspired me to play around a bit with paper. I had an idea of what I wanted, but I knew it was going to be fragile.

The first card I made was paper-cut text glued onto a solid piece of construction paper. For this second card, I decided to get fancy and do a couple of paper-cuts layered together. First, I cut out the main text.

And the different sets of secondary text.

birthday text in process

birthday!

instructions under construction 

instructions!

And because this one was a bit more fragile, I decided that it needed a case.

I'm a sucker for birds, and I just happened to have a bit of old wrapping paper lying around. It wasn't quite big enough, but with a few construction paper additions, I had myself a shmancy looking custom case.

Once I had the case and all of the text cut out, I got to gluing. I love the smell of proper paper paste - it reminds me of sunny, dusty libraries and old books. No photos of in-process gluing - I didn't want to get any glue on my poor, malfunctioning camera. It certainly didn't need anything else gumming up the works.

Ta da!