Papercutting is a really labour intensive practice that requires an enormous amount of concentration and a steady hand. With a bit of patience it produces beautiful results, backache, and a touch of eye strain - I love it!

I always start a piece by deciding on the subject. Over the years I’ve found Foxes, Hares and Blackbirds to be amongst the favourites and, although the jury’s out with Crows and Mice, I make them anyway!

After planning and hand drawing the design onto the reverse of a selection of tonal papers, I get cutting. The process takes a few hours and several cups of tea for each layer. After which I use a selection of nifty tools to mould, curl and emboss the detailed foliage. After making the body of the subject I make a deep box frame and carefully assemble the layers of paper into it

Below you can watch a time-lapse video of me putting together my recent piece ‘Beady Eyed’. After cutting several layers of the foliage, leaving the outline of the bird as a base, I individually cut each component ready to attach. Over the course of a few hours, I build the magpie feather by feather until it’s happily nestled into it’s new home.

This video spans around 2.5 hours in real time.

Enjoy!

Creating my original ‘3D’ pieces can take days, sometimes weeks, so I also produce originals cut out of a single sheet of paper. These single sheet pieces can be scanned and then sent off to be reproduced using a laser cutter. Some of these are still hand finished with extra touches of colour or texture, but the process enables me to offer a broader range of products including greetings cards, limited edition prints and lanterns.

I try to replicate my original work as closely as I can

Watch the laser cutter in action……….