From that to this

This is how I made two of the new papercuts now offered in the Urban Collective shop,
Vintage Summer Garden and Vintage Butterflies. 

I started with searching for vintage illustrations and photos online and in picture books. Cut & paste and arranged in Illustrator. Veeery ornate, isn't it? Now comes the fun part.

Even though I have a Wacom Intuos tablet for quite some time, I still prefer to draw with pencil and paper. A bit stupid, really, given that I have the tools to do differently, but what can I say. I printed the layout and drew over it, tweaking the design as I saw fit.

Scanned back into the computer, and got busy tracing over the drawing (illustrator pen tool is your friend), smoothing out the lines and readying the papercut for lasercutting. This is a long and tiresome process, when I play a lot of movies, trash tv, listen to songs and generally try to multitask to make it more enjoyable. I have a feeling at times my efforts make this stage go slower than it should. Oh well.

And the final result, is this: