It’s been a while I know, we’ve been so busy, not to mention the end of the 2018 has come round all too quick!

With papercut crafts being really on trend at the moment, we have finally been commissioned to undertake some papercut projects! We are super excited with the results we’ve been able to achieve. Read on to see some of the things we’ve been up to.

Planning the Papercut Design

We were asked to come up with a wedding gift for a family friend who was due to get married. We came up with the idea of a nice little custom designed keepsake in the form of a papercut that we would then frame. With this type of project, getting the design right first really was key. This first rough design below was the first option we came up with.

This design was okay but we quickly thought that it felt too flat and had very little character. It didn’t fit with the vision that we had. It was along the right lines with the swashes but the type itself was too serious and lacked excitement. After all this was a wedding, so the design had to reflect the excitement of the day!

Revising The Design

Round 2, we looked at some different choices for typography and we quickly found some suitable font choices that were more in line with the vision that we had. 

After lots of playing and tweaking the typography, along with adding in some additional vector elements, we came up with the final design that you see below. The tricky thing about getting this to work was largely that because it’s a papercut, every element needed to be joined in some way.

Once finalised, the next thing to do was to print the design out. This would become the template we used to ‘transfer’ the design to the beautiful shiny paper/card stock that the final cut would be made from. Here’s a closeup of the design printed out.

Here you can see how the design transferred to the shiny card stock. I did this by laying the template over the card stock and cutting the design out. This then scored the design onto the front of the shiny card stock. This then made cutting the design out much easier. You could also use tracing paper and transfer the image that way.

If you were to do it that way I’d advise that it would be best to print the design template in reverse and then transfer it onto the back of the card. This will eliminate any pencil marks from the front of your design. It takes time and practice. This paper cut is definitely by no means perfect and getting the curves smooth and flowing cutting by hand is much easier said than done!

Below you’ll see the design cut out entirely from the shiny white card stock. You can see now why everything needed to be joined up. We wanted to eliminate having to stick together tiny little pieces of card. Since we knew we were going to put this into a frame we didn’t want little bits that could slide or fall down. 

We sourced an 18cm x 18cm frame from Hobbycraft which was the size we created the design to fit. We used a piece of clear plastic which gave the final piece the appearance of ‘floating’ inside the frame. Better than this, when the light catches the design it casts a really nice shadow as you can see here.

Just for nothing more than fun and creativity we finished the digital version of the design that you see below. I think you’ll agree it has a real vibe of fun and energy about it. We’re super pleased with the results we achieved together on this project. We hope you enjoyed briefly reading about how we executed this project as much as we enjoyed creating it.