tiny papercuttings

[corvi]

juli  and I just got back from one of our biannual trips to Cambridge for her schooling, and I am having trouble readjusting to ordinary wash-the-dishes life. Also, one of the goats seriously injured herself yesterday, and while she's now totally fine and harassing the sheep as usual, I keep having flashbacks to the overwhelming image of holding a struggling goat with blood matted in her fur at inopportune times, such as while trying to eat.

Time for happy distractions. Suggest to me a subject for a Tiny Papercutting!

Tiny Papercuttings will be made out of 3x5 index cards (8ish by 12ish cm), and I'll post a reasonably sized photo, and also a dreamwidth-icon-sized image, like the icon I'm using for this post.

Comments

[twoeleven]

That works really well as an icon.

Since you did a tree before, why not see the forest for it? :) A whole forest is probably excessive given the limitations of the medium, but even a grove would be neat.

[katherine]

Catfish! Or fish in general if you're not keen on whiskers.

whiskers are most excellent

[corvi]

Today I have learned: catfish are pretty hard to portray. :) Thanks for the excellent suggestion, muttering about how weird catfish are definitely cheered me up from Goat Disaster.

If you would like a little catfish papercut icon, here you go:



And I thought it might look interesting with the colors reversed:

Re: whiskers are most excellent

[katherine]

This is very neat! All those whiskers and I like the way the fish is curved towards itself.

Tiny papercutting

[dialecticdreamer]

Could you create a folk sankofa? The goose, not the stylized heart.

Sankofa

[corvi]

A folkish sankofa! I've never tried to do anything folk-styled before, I have a lot to learn, hehe. I like the way the nature-inspired motifs (ferns and spirals) came out, but the more geometric ones could use improvement, I think.

Thank you so much for the suggestion, I had never heard of a sankofa before, and the symbolism is very neat. I enjoyed making this a lot.

It's late, and I want to clean up the rough photo a little before making an icon, but tomorrow I will post an icon you can use if you'd like.

Re: Sankofa

[dialecticdreamer]

Could you do the photo/icon with a dark blue background? Does it change the way the sankofa looks? More curious than anything.

[ivy]

Lucky carp!

[corvi]

You have given me the gift of Cutting Out So Many Scales. This is remarkably fun, and people look at you funny when you do it in a bar. :D Thank you!

If you would like a lucky carp journal icon of your very own, here is one:

[ivy]

Thank you! I am delighted, and more so that the experience was fun for you. Hee! (Unexpected presents are the best!)

[corvi]

If you visit, I would be thrilled to give you the original. :)

[ivy]

That would be wonderful; thank you! I will now arrange a visit. :D This weekend is probably shot, and I think most of next week is car repair, but after that let's find a time that works!

Hmm...

[ysabetwordsmith]

Celtic knotwork.

Re: Hmm...

[corvi]

I was stymied on knotwork, since papercutting isn't a very good way to make exact, symmetric designs, but juli suggested I look at Manx knotwork, which is somewhat less geometric. I found a great knotwork dragon in this paper about how Scandinavian motifs influenced Manx knotwork.

You have a ton of great icons already, but if you would like a Celtic-Scandinavian knotwork dragon, maybe for posting about the cross-culture crew at Hart's Farm, here you go!



Thank you for the prompt, it definitely broadened my papercutting skills, and my appreciation of the breadth of knotwork. :)

[eeyorerin]

Penguin!

Also, I am sorry one of the goats got hurt. Was it Tesseract or Soup-Nose?

[juli]

'Twas Soup, who got a minor gash on her udder climbing through a barbed-wire fence. Blood stop powder covers a multitude of whatevers, but it was pretty horrific at the time. Cups of blood. Bleh.