A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was going to be really busy working on a project, and well, here it is! It's my first commission, one of my clients asked me to make it for her bedroom. The brief was that the canvases had to be 18 x 30, with a turquoise background - and possibly include some cherry blossoms.
The turnaround time was fairly quick - about 3 weeks. I had an idea about composition right from the start - I wanted the little birds to be looking at one another, and to kind of do my own take on the traditional Chinese scroll painting.
Once I decided to use papercuts, "coloured in" with Chiyogami paper, it all came together. I really enjoyed working on these - the process of making the cuts and choosing the patterned paper was a lot of fun.
This is a closeup of one of the birds, which shows the detail and pattern in the paper a bit better...
...and here are the cherry blossoms. It was such an honour to be asked to do this commission - I so admire my clients taste and style, and she really put a lot of faith in me. She'd only seen my books, never any other work I'd done, but still asked me to do these for her. Doing this project has really given me a boost and opened some new possibilities for me. I will be working on some smaller versions of these canvases over the summer, and I'm really excited about it. I'll keep you posted...
A couple of weeks ago, I mentioned that I was going to be really busy working on a project, and well, here it is! It's my first commission, one of my clients asked me to make it for her bedroom. The brief was that the canvases had to be 18 x 30, with a turquoise background - and possibly include some cherry blossoms.
The turnaround time was fairly quick - about 3 weeks. I had an idea about composition right from the start - I wanted the little birds to be looking at one another, and to kind of do my own take on the traditional Chinese scroll painting.
Once I decided to use papercuts, "coloured in" with Chiyogami paper, it all came together. I really enjoyed working on these - the process of making the cuts and choosing the patterned paper was a lot of fun.
This is a closeup of one of the birds, which shows the detail and pattern in the paper a bit better...
...and here are the cherry blossoms. It was such an honour to be asked to do this commission - I so admire my clients taste and style, and she really put a lot of faith in me. She'd only seen my books, never any other work I'd done, but still asked me to do these for her. Doing this project has really given me a boost and opened some new possibilities for me. I will be working on some smaller versions of these canvases over the summer, and I'm really excited about it. I'll keep you posted...
8 comments:
these are so beautiful, trudi!!!! congratulations on your comission! i love the colours you used and the cut outs are just perfect. i can't wait to see more of these.
Your panels are beautiful and I love the tuquoise colour. At first I didn't realise they were papercuts, thought they were painted, but the close ups show really well your immaculate cutting and great choice of papers. Very inspiring and something that I would be pleased to put on my walls.
Did you paint the background with acryl paint?
And did you varnish everything afterwards?
Nice work, must be difficult to cut out paper so precisely.
Wow, they look great! Congrats on your first commission, they're just fantastic. They remind me of "stained glass" quilts. How did you make the black outlines?
TRUDI! these are so fantastic + what a great new direction for you to take. What a wonderful opportunity.
this is beautifully done Trudi! They're truly wonderful ...
Thanks for all your nice comments! To answer your questions, Austen - the outlines are cut from a text weight chocolate brown paper and Sabine - I used a heavy bodied acrylic paint, and glued/sealed with acrylic matte medium. I would love to hear what other people use on collages though - I tried a variety of varnishes and sealing mediums on scraps of paper, and wasn't really happy with the result - they all seemed to change the "character" of the paper. The matte medium seemed the best, but I'm wondering if there's something better out there?
Wow, lovely! So precisely made and a beautiful composition.
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