Paper Cut Birthday Card

For a recent friend's birthday I decided to make her a special card.

I wanted to do a paper cut card so that I could use my new craft knife which has a rotating blade, specifically for cutting around curves.

I drew out my image on blue card and then got to cutting. I had to make sure each element of the picture was connected so that it didn't fall out when cut around.

When all the cutting out was done I decided to put white paper behind the blue card to make the image stand out.

This is where I had a bit of a fail. I decided to use spray glue to stick the paper and the card, so I sprayed the back of the blue card. Unfortunately blobs of glue got through to the front of the card, there were stringy bits between shapes and the glue stained through to the front in places. 

Don't by cheap spray glue people! Get the proper spray mount stuff!

I stuck the card to paper anyway and tried to pick off the blobs of glue but it still looked messy. So I decided to paint over the blue card completely with blue paint. In hindsight this would have been better done before I stuck on the white paper because I kept getting bits of paint on the white paper which was very frustrating.

But the level of messy this created wasn't as bad as the hot mess it was before so it was an improvement.

And my friend loved the card!

Paper Cuts

Another of the summer children's art workshops I did was about paper cuts. The art form, not the injury.

I needed to come up with an activity that could just be done with scissors because I don't think 5 year olds should be given craft knives.

After some Googling I found that you can make pretty paper cut leaves just by folding paper in half.

And what are leaves without a tree?

So the first thing we did in the session was paint this tree on a few big sheets of paper that I'd pinned on the wall. Then the children got very messy paintings hand prints. 

They got the hang of the technique very quickly and were soon coming up with some really imaginative patterns.

After the leaves the children were free to experiment with the paper and what they could achieve just by folding it.

They also layered their paper cuts and added more colour.