Papercuts and Typography ll

Introduction
Papercuts are believed to have originated in ancient China, but are common to many other folk cultures including those of Japan, Mexico, the UK, Poland and the USA.
Papercuts are made from sheets of blank paper and can be cut with just a pair of scissors or a sharp blade.

Tools
Pencil                                  Craft knife
Tracing Paper                      Small scissors
Paper for the design             Cutting Mat
Masking tape                       Stylus or burnishing tool

Polish papercutting was a traditional folk art originally carried out by peasant women, and motifs included designs

Variations on a theme

Here are some fun things I tried out on the Paper Tiger Moth heading using the Gradient Map (under Adjustments on the Layers Palette in Adobe Elements), and Hue and Saturation.

Orange and Yellow Gradient

Violet, Orange and Blue Gradient

Achieved using the Hue slider in the Hue and Saturation box

Typography and Papercuts

The heading for this blog was created with a papercut manipulated in Adobe Elements.  Realising the concept involved finding a suitable typeface, research into images of tigers and moths, design, photography, and image manipulation.

The idea was to have a white on white minimalist wording and logo.  The alphabet selected was one of Josef Albers Kombinationshrift designs.

    'Do less in order to do more' - said Josef Albers.

Albers created these alphabets while at the Bauhaus school in the 1930s', and they exemplify the school's ethos of simplicity of form and function. This particular alphabet uses 10 basic shapes based on a circle and rectangle and produces a font that is meant to be easy to learn and economic both to use and produce.

You can see in this diagram the 10 shapes that Josef Albers used to make this Alphabet.

Projects to Try
1.  Devise your own alphabet out of two or three simple shapes.
2.  Collect small objects or parts of objects that look like letters.
     Scan them (remember to cover the glass with an acetate sheet to protect it),
     and compose into an alphabet on your desktop, and print.
     Or,
     If you have a darkroom, make photograms of the objects, and mount them
     together to form a composite alphabet.
3.  Photograph abstract subjects that together form an alphabet.

Here are some interesting examples:-

Photogram alphabet by Dutch Osborne

Flotsam and Jetsom - Peter Tonnington (scanned objects)

Fellaparts font designed by Ed Fella in 1993 and distributed by Emigre, Inc.

 For other examples see David Airey's gallery at www.davidairey.com/alphabet-photo-art-gallery/

New Beginning

My first project for this blog is to create suitable images to support the title. This will involve research into tigers and tiger moths and trying out various techniques using paper as a material.