Cut-Out Apples

Creative Sketchbooks, Module 1,

Chapter 5,
Activity 5.1.

Create a design by cutting a shape into segments.

 

 

This was fabulous -I was a bit wary of chopping up my decorated papers, because they look so wonderful, and I enjoyed making them so much, but when I sat back and looked at my cut-out shapes I thought they were really effective, and they pleased me more than anything else I’ve done so far. I like the way this distorts the apple, and you have the solid cut-out shapes , but better still there are patterns in the empty spaces (are these negative spaces?), which were quite unintentional on my part - it sounds silly, but they really took me by surprise. I particularly like those sinuous curves of the green space on the first red apple in the second row.

I chose my apple from earlier chapters for my shape, and just chopped it up and re-arranged the pieces as the mood took me. The paper for the first piece was photographic paper, rollered with blue and purple ink, then overpainted when dry with red acrylic, which was marked with a fork while wet, so the ink showed through (but you can’t see the colours properly in the scanned image). I tried the shapes on various sheets of decorated paper, but none of them did anything for my cut-out red apples, so I thought of the complementary colours I studied back in Chapter 2, and stuck them on some bright, plain, green paper, which isn’t what I was meant to do, but I think it looks good.

The second piece of paper was thinnish cartridge paper, painted with watery powder paint, which was scattered with salt crystals and the apples were cut from sugar paper which had been painted with wiggly acrylic lines.