In writing last week about the process of bringing The Colors Danced from its original to its present form, I referenced that choosing what media to use for illustration was a surprisingly difficult decision for me. I wanted to use too many things--watercolor, oil pastel, chalk pastel, colored paper, tempera paint. I knew that for the illustrations to make sense, I needed to narrow the playing field. And while I have admired papercut illustration in various children’s books for a long time, I sort of forgot why I ultimately chose to use it for my new illustrations.
Ah yes! It was because I’m bad at drawing hands.
In the original, I got around this snafu by coating my own hands in tempera paint and printing them onto the paper, filling in color later with oil pastels. I had mixed success. I loved the result here:
Over here, not so much:
Reimagining the first picture with any color, in which God is pouring out the rainbow into clay pots, I decided on an experiment. I just Google Image-searched cupped hands, found what I was looking for, and figured out a way to kind of reverse-trace the image. I didn’t have a light source strong enough to go through scrapbook paper, nor did I want any pencil marks showing up on the edges. I honestly don’t remember how I stumbled on this technique, or know whether it’s used by other artists. Probably so.
I LOVED the result. Those cupped hands were so beautiful to me that, where the original story had two pages showing God’s hands, it has blossomed to showcase His hands in various acts of creation on fifty percent of the pages.
Though I began with an iStock image, I quickly found that Google could not in fact give me what I was usually looking for. I started photographing my own hands in the positions I wanted. For one spread I roped my hubby into being the hand model, because I couldn’t act out the angle I needed and take a photo of it at the same time. I like the “library” of hands I collected which became the models for The Colors Danced.
God’s hands became not just a character in this story, but really the main character. I think it’s very fitting, because in any account of Creation, of course the incredible part is that it’s all generated out of God’s imagination. Creator God is the force behind every creation, and every good and perfect gift.
How To Do Papercut Illustration
Here I’m going to teach you how to do some papercut illustration, and just show you the process of how I do that. In addition to illustration, I have used paper cutting, either by this “reverse tracing” technique or freehand, to embellish custom scrapbook pages, to make cards, and to share with my kids in preschool homeschool lessons or crafting.
First choose your image. In this case I’ll start with one I generated myself. These two black-eyed susans were cut from my front flower bed, and I made a rubbing of them. You know how you do a leaf rubbing--you put down your leaf, you put your paper over your leaf and use the side of a crayon to rub it. The image of the leaf with all its veins comes through and it’s beautiful. So basically I did the same thing here. The central cone of a black-eyed susan causes a little problem here, because it sticks up almost an inch tall. So I actually took a pair of scissors and just cut it off near the base so it was flat enough to get under the paper for a decent flower rubbing. Then I used my light table to trace that rubbing and I have these two images.
Depending on what finished product you’re going for, you can print something off Google Images, use a print of your own photo, grab a coloring book page, whatever. Just realize that the image you use will get ruined, so don’t use an original that you want to keep.
Then I chose my paper colors. Scrapbook paper is much more effective than construction paper here; construction paper fades in sunlight, but more importantly it isn’t a thick enough weight to put up with the tools so well. If your image can be cut out with scissors that’s fine--this is the level that you would use when crafting with your kids--but if you are working with more detail and the x-acto blade is needed, use better paper. This one here on the paper where i want and then i’m going to tape it i’ll kind of put it in a little bit so the tape here can cover both edges and ten again down in the corner so they’re kind of separate from each other
This tool is just a wooden stylus. You see mine here down at the tip is black but that’s just black paint i mixed up with it or something, it isn’t any kind of pencil at all. Over here whaat i do now is just trace over this and i use eough pressure that i go over the details pretty thoroughly so that when i remove this image the indented part will show up really nicely on the paper underneath and it’s along the ident that i will then cut because my goal is to have with the colored papers that i will be able to instead of using paint or markers or caryons, whatever, that i have a color illustration made entirely out of paper. It’s surprising how not symmetrical these petals are because of course in the flower in the finished flower it’s beautifully symetrical is how it appears but hen youre using your actual imrprint from the flower and you see the detail of it
Now i’ll do these inner little petals
You realize that really every petal is an individual, and its quite extraordinary. So now i will go around this middle portion. So i’ve traced my flower, i’ve gone all over it. So here’s an angle form which you can kind of see there the indent from the flower has come through onto the paper. It’s obviously not super easy to see but that’s fine because in real life i can follow that pretty well. I’m going to remove this top image, and now i’m going to get out an exacto blade
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