This past weekend I went to the Spanish Market at the Santa Fe plaza. There were all sorts of crafts, including papercuts (called papel picado in Spanish). They are so intricate, and I thought, not for the first time, about trying one myself. I also saw a demonstration of tinwork — decorations punched into tin (see some examples here) — and I got to look at several punches.
When I got home, I found this page about papel picado that says the designs are sometimes cut the same way as tinwork: “the artisan … cuts through multiple layers of paper using a mallet to pound finely sharpened chisels of varying sizes and shapes through the paper and into the sheet of lead.” (Who knew? I assumed they used scissors or an xacto blade!)
Today, courtesy of Steve Mehallo’s blog, I found a seemingly easier papercutting method — shadow typography done by Seree Kang — see below. You can see more of her work here including a variation she calls “Cube Typography.”
