Meadow Life

P.S. Forgot to add, during the cutting, remember to cut all the little pieces out first and work your way up to the biggest areas last (and cut slowly, because you can't undo/erase!). And, just like in stencils, everything in the design has to be touching everything else to keep the overall cohesion, so you may have to tweak the design slightly to achieve that.

It's actually pretty simple to do; for a pic like this, you would use light blue paper for the background, and white tracing paper for the fairy wings, and overlay the papercutting made from black paper. Do the cutting separately (some use a rubber mat or plastic/wood cutting board to work on), and on the backside of the black paper, draw out the design in white colored pencil, but draw a flipped version of it (including any text you would want to add). You can flip it with any paint program, and print it out first, if needed. Then cut out all the negative spaces with an X-Acto knife or very sharp small scissors (a knife works best for me). You might have to thicken and simplify the designs of some of the hair strands, feather edges, flowers stalks and insect legs and antenna, because those very thin lines will be hard to cut and glue down.

When you're all done cutting, just take a gluestick (which you can get at a scrapbooking store), and carefully start spreading the glue onto the drawn side of the cutting, starting at one corner or one edge, and slowly work your way to the opposite corner/edge. You can only spread a small amount of glue before it dries, so you have to glue the cutting onto the background paper(s) in increments. That's why I work from one edge or corner to the other; it's easier to glue it bit-by-bit that way. If you can find some spray glue, that would work even better, because then you could spray the entire cutting and press it down in one quick go before it dries. When you're all done gluing, you'll have an image that looks like the one above, but only made of cut paper. Here are some examples of my cuttings: [link]