Paper Cut Stargazing Hares

In January, I had a little experiment to set me off on my way to becoming the next Rob Ryan, with a small scale papercut 'Dream' which gave me, I felt, enough practice to go ahead and create a present for my Mum using papercut (!) - luckily for me, it went OK and today, I'm posting about the results.

My Mum is a hug fan of stargazing hare art, so this was my inspiration and I did make sure I simplified it to shadow outlines and a simple design, created by free-hand drawing my ideas:

 ...I sketched out lots of ideas, using google images for guides and tracing any I was happy with on to the next.  Finally, I decided two hares on a hill with a star-filled curved sky was the way to go:

 ....but the sky was still a little problem, so I decided to only transfer the hares on to the card.

Back to school with this method - I needed the design to be in reverse so that the pencil marks wouldn't show through.  To do this, I traced over the design I wanted to transfer in bold pencil.  I then turned this over on to the card.  Over the back, I transferred the image by drawing over the image:

 This then created a light transfer - reflected, ready to be cut:

 Perfect.  I then lightly sketched basic stars, all across the skyline and got cutting.  

I bought a new knife recently form The Range for £2.00 [you get 5 different knife head styles] 

and using the finest knife, followed my lines:

The sharp, fine knife made such a difference to creating neat, fine and snag-free cuts:

I removed all the cut card away and tidied any lines...

 ...and checked the image from the 'front':

 I was really pleased with the result, but felt the image would be better defined if it has a background, rather than be left and mounted in a floating frame.  I have some embossed felt that I thought would be perfect - grey for the sky and a blue for the stars:

 

 Once the glue had dried, I decided to finish it off with a little detail in the sky with embroidery thread - I was a little inspired by Aboriginal Dream art with the design of the felt: 

 

I then cut away the excess card and framed the paper cut, ready to give to my Mum for her birthday:

 I hope she likes it!

see you next time x