Fairies and Driving

Two projects demanded a lot of scissor work: one was where a young woman walks down a mountain infested, enchanted?, with fairies, and the other project is where a monster is barreling down a highway in a fast car. Cutting out microscopic fairies and the wild, splayed-hand arm gestures from the first-person perspective of a monster driving his car were among the first really intriguing, real interesting, honestly engaging work that I did while pursuing a career in art. These two projects share one major component, beyond inkwork, painting, composition, and wordless storytelling: the craft behind paper cutting. Each fairy trickster in gowns of leaves and woven spider-thread, each rear-view mirror needing a separate scene painted, reversed and just a tiny bit blurry inside its half-inch-by-three-inch frame, each hand and every strand of arm hair and stray lock of hair caught by the wind, each and every one of these had to get cut, snipped, and teased out of its paper home without losing even a bit of ink, and without including a shred of white, or else risk losing the original composition and vision. Because even if I redraw the damaged piece, well, I'd have to cut that one out too, wouldn't I?

And it would have to be cut out perfect as well.

After a time it became a challenge to see just how fine a character I could cut out. It turned out, the problem wasn't how small a character I could cut, anyone can cut out something as tiny as they like. The issue was, did the element that small need to be cut out at all? I experimented with laying down plastic to make sparkle effects to allude to otherwordly beings in the paintings, and that would work to an extent. But it wasn't half as good as cutting out the characters and arranging them on the page. Only trouble is, now I've got a box full of fairies and interiors of cars and there's no way to recreate the scenes. The photos I took of the walk down the fairy mountain are all that are going to be of those exact positions of characters even with having kept each piece, and to be honest, that's ok with me.

There's more to it than just having pieces to rearrange on a painting. The reason behind cutting out elements rather than painting or drawing them was, for the mountain project, the fairies and the woman going off on the journey had all already been drawn back in 2019. The work was done, and all that had to be done was to print out a copy of my original art, cut out the characters, and paint up a background using the original backgrounds as a template. This proved not only interesting to use a full year's worth of painting experience to use in making the mountain come alive in vibrant watercolor, but also because I got to see the drawings with something not many people get to enjoy: I was able to see my characters with a fresh pair of eyes. The linework, the character designs, all of it: it had been a full three-hundred and sixty-five days since I had last seen the first set of fairies, and in that time I had made more than that many new drawings and characters. Not only that, but getting in and outlining the characters not only in ink but also with steel made me reexamine my work. And the work stood up to that level of examination. It was a fun project, rewarding in being able to present something not only new, but also beautiful to my social media audiences.

The same can't be said for the driving project: the novelty of going in and cutting out older work has been enjoyed and appreciated, and beyond that, this project calls for new art from start to finish. Each critical moment in the driver's seat has to be selected, conceptualized, and drawn, and then cut out and applied over a new background element. Too many of the same scenery and I risk reader fatigue. Too fast with no time to linger on a moment and the story isn't being true to a drive through nature: it may be pretty and all, it's just that there's a lot of it and it's awful slow to change. When it does change it changes quick, so that's been a tough challenge to overcome. Brevity and value are always at odds. Even so, with all the experience behind the blades, at least, at the very least, the cutting will look good.