I finally got to see the finished version of the card that the University of Essex made with my design for their thesis competition. With no further ado…
Unfortunately they didn’t airbrush out some of the little mistakes I made, but I guess it proves that I really made it myself. Looking back at my papercut posts, I’m really happy with the progress I’ve made since I first picked up a scalpel a few months ago. Also the beautiful blue of the background doesn’t look that good. They kindly returned the original to me, so I will see if I can get a picture that is more true to colour.
Here is the reverse of the card, which is slightly less exciting (but does namecheck me). I’m not sure how I feel about the fact that this may be the only publication that comes out of my doctorate…
It’s nice to think of these going out to all of the shellshocked and baffled people who somehow find themselves in Colchester handing over their brain babies.
I was pleased to get some all too rare good news during the week- the card I designed for the competition my university ran won! Although, like my thesis itself, it came back with some minor corrections. Unlike the thesis, however, the corrections did come with a very welcome addition to the prize, which means I should be able to afford a nice new backpack for my summer travels.
I spent an evening working on the amendments. They wanted me to change ‘Life after thesis’ to ‘Life after the thesis’ and also to remove my little quip about thesis-related nightmares. Apparently they want the tone of a celebratory card to be ‘light’. I don’t really do light.
I think it looks okay with the changes. Can you tell? I removed the line with ‘after’ on it, re-cut a line with ‘after the’ on it and popped it in place. Removing the text about nightmares proved surprisingly difficult. I hope the commissioners will be happy with what I was able to do.
I designed this paper cut for a competition run by the university I technically attend. They decided, after we submitted, that it would be nice to give students a card when they hand in and further we, the students who left the office with nothing but horrible memories, would be best placed to design that card. Unfortunately I’m a total sucker for an excuse to make stuff so I had a go.
Even though there are quite a few mistakes (including two areas where I had to stick sections of text back together!) overall I’m happy with this piece. I like to set myself really ambitious craft challenges sometimes, and this was definitely one of the hardest!
It took about two or three hours to do the preparation- designing, drawing up the final composition, transferring it to tracing paper and then onto the final piece of card. The actual cutting took about eight hours in total. By the end I had a really sore back from sitting hunched over my cutting mat as well as an impressive blister on my index finger. I would have looked like a hybrid of Quasimodo and ET as I hobbled around showing people my injured finger. Craft is so cool.
Here is yet another GIF of my work on my Tumblr. And now for some progress pics.
Initial sketch
Final design
Transferring the reversed design onto card.
This is what it looked like once I had cut out the design.
I’ve been inspired by the work of Paper Panda, which is where I got the idea for the rainbow. It was fiddly to do at first but I got the hang of it after a couple of colours.
The final stage was to add the backing. If I had photo editing software, I would probably clean it up a bit, but I can live with the flaws. They prove it’s handmade.
The Crafty Crusader 