What is papercutting (papercut art)?
Papercutting is a long-historied art form first pioneered in ancient China, and appearing in many cultures throughout the world.
The basic idea when making papercut art is to cut out shapes from a single piece of paper, until the portions that remain create a relief image or design. Critically, all the remaining parts after cutting must still be connected (i.e., no floating pieces). Thus, the final artwork is one unified piece, and not a reconstituted collage of many cut-out parts.
Below, I explain the process that I follow to create my papercuts, with process pictures from a cutout of a mammoth that I made.
Step 1: Initial sketch
The first thing I do when working on a new papercut is to sketch a design with pencil and paper. (Many masters of the art form actually freehand their pieces, but I'm not that advanced).
Broadly speaking, the white areas in the sketch are what I will ultimately cut out, leaving the penciled sections remaining. This means I can make sure at the sketching stage that everything is interconnected – and brainstorm how I'll include those connections in the design in a natural-looking way.
For example, in this sketch, you can see how I planned to connect the mammoth's eye to its forehead and mouth using shadows and wrinkle lines.
Step 2: Beginning to cut
Once the sketch is ready, I tape it to the colored paper I'm going to use for the actual piece. and begin cutting.
I always start from the center and work outwards, choosing the order and direction of cuts very carefully. Every cut exerts pressures on the rest of the paper (especially the nearby sections), so I'm constantly thinking about how best to maintain the structural integrity of the piece.
For example, if you're pulling the knife away from an area of the design with thin or fragile components that have already been cut out, those pieces can crinkle towards the direction of the knife, or even rip – potentially ruining the entire artwork. That's why I always start from the middle of the design, so that each next cut is still supported by the solid sheet of paper on one side.
Step 3: The rest of the cut
As I go, I constantly check my work, viewing the colored paper from the back to see how the final piece is looking. In addition to checking whether the design is actually coming out how I intended, I'm also checking the thickness of my lines and the cleanness of the cuts (especially curves and corners).
While I generally follow the sketch, it's more of a guide than an exact template. There are usually some sections where I freehand the precise details, or change from my original intentions in a way that I think will look/work better.
For example, you can see in these pictures that the way I connected the mammoth's eye to the rest of the face was actually different from what I had sketched. As I got to this part, I felt that what I sketched wasn't going to translate well, so I freehanded this part over what I had drawn.
Step 4: Finishing and mounting
By the time I'm almost done, there will just be a few points of connection left around the edges, between the artwork itself and the sheet of paper I'm cutting it out of. These I sever last, finally freeing my work and letting me remove the sketch layer to reveal the finished piece.
At this point, though, it's still not actually "finished." First, I look carefully over the final product, checking for areas that need cleaning up. I touch up these spots with the knife.
Then, I mount the papercut on a backing piece of paper. Often this backing is white, but sometimes I'll choose a different color; the main goal is to create a strong contrast with the cutout. When a color other than white will serve this purpose, especially if it goes with a color theme that suits the contents of the piece, I'll use that instead.
The mammoth cutout featured on this page was mounted on two layers of backing: a dusky pink and a chiffon yellow, to create a vibrant Los Angeles sunset feel for the piece.
What makes papercutting art unique?
To me, there are 2 things that stand out about papercutting as an art form:
1. Interconnected, dichromatic design
The challenge of creating a design that is recognizable and attractive in just a single color (plus a background color) is hard enough in itself. Add in the fact that everything has to be connected together, and it can be quite the problem to solve. A good deal of the work of making a papercut actually happens during the design step, long before any cutting happens.
2. Preciseness & fragility of execution
Papercutting is an unforgiving medium. Every cut you make is permanent – there's no undoing, no erasing; a whole piece can be ruined by one wrong slice. Sometimes mistakes can be "fixed," but only by using the mistake in a new way, not by getting rid of it.
While in some ways this is a negative, there is a beauty in it – a rare case in life when perfection is necessary; a lesson in living with mistakes; or just a tough but rewarding challenge to overcome.