Weekend Class

This past weekend, I took another class at The Center for Book Arts. The course was called Short Cuts and was taught by one of the most generous and talented artists that I have met through classes. The class was taught by the amazing paper cut artist--Beatrice Coron. Her paper cuts have recently appeared at MOMA and I fell in love with her work by viewing it up close and personal at Kate's Paperie where she did Halloween Window Displays. Much to my pleasure, she is one of several artists who was chosen this year to provide artwork for Arts for Transit Program. Her poster is currently being featured on several of the subway lines. I purchased her artcard through the Arts for Transit store.

I thoroughly enjoyed her class and will definitely repeat it when it is offered again. The beauty of the class is that there are four components (black and white cutouts, color cutouts, cutouts for stenciling and paper engineering). Beatrice allows students to pick and choose the elements they want to pursue. If a student wishes to delve deeper in one component, Beatrice allows that student to do so. It is that type of learning that I appreciated the most--both as a student and as a teacher.

You see, I hate taking classes in the creative arts. I hate getting compared to what other people are doing. I am not overly creative on the spot. I love to think about what I want to do; I plod along. Other people are much more free-form when it comes to creating and they create some wonderful things that I could never do on the spot. I like to go home and experiment with what I want to do and will usually create some nice projects based on what happened in class.

The two projects that I concentrated on were color cutouts. The assignment was to take inspiration from artwork/pictures that were published and then to turn them into paper cuts. In class, I was working on a Little Mermaid poster from a advertisement for the Broadway musical. In order to perform the colored cutouts, you are required to make several copies of the cutout in different colors. Theoretically, you are supposed to cut out all versions of the cutout simultaneously. I didn't have adequate knife skills to do that so I cut my out in batches of two. I didn't quite finish the poster in class so I am still working on it at home.

The project that I did complete was done at home. I took the advertisement for the Lion King musicals and turned it into a paper cut. It was almost cheating because the advertisement is already very similar to a paper cut. I had to add a few connections for it to work. I prepared two cutouts of the image-one in black and one in grey. I mounted them slightly apart as to create a shadow. I mounted them on yellow orange card stock to mimic the actual poster.