I was contacted by a lady in Melbourne who wanted to commission a special piece for her fiancee. The papercut shows the spot where they had their first date and the quote is a line from their favourite song. She emailed me a photo of the location so that I could get an idea of how she wanted the piece to look. My design brief was to portray two figures on a bench under an elm tree, overlooking the river, with trees on the opposite bank.
The challenge with this one was the water. When I drew it out initially, I drew continuous lines across to show the water. This just didn't look good as it dominated the design and distracted from the two figures and pretty much everything else as well. My problem was how to show the ripples of the water and still keep it as one piece of paper - I'm very purist about my papercutting in that way!
My solution was to break up the lines, but hold them together by adding some more little stars in the water. I think this adds to the general twinkliness (if that's a word?) of the image. So now it's heading off to Melbourne - I hope they like it!"
