Paper Cutting: Birds

It's been a long time between paper-cuttings. I'd finished this first one a little while ago but had been saving it till I could complete another to make enough substance for my next paper-cutting post.

This is a Dover Royalty free image; the silhouette of branches and the tiny birds is subject matter I'd like to work with more.

Next, a paper-cut showing one of our Wattle birds on a nest. Since it is our Spring-time, it's all happening still. Ironically, as I was standing beside an open window this morning cutting this out, a regular visitor to our garden .. the Wattle bird, was "singing" it's raucous song. It really made for an appropriate backdrop for my cutting session.

One Spring we could hear Mum Wattle bird making quite a commotion and found that one of her babies had fallen from the nest. Actually the baby bird was quite some distance from the nest when this photo was taken. As luck will have it we knew where she had been nesting and Des was able to get a ladder and put the little bird back in there.

So I'm adding this pic to finish off my paper-cutting post; it was a story with a happy ending that was timely to share with you.

A day out: Hunter Valley Gardens

These gardens are set in the beautiful Hunter Valley of N.S.W., a location renowned for it's abundance of the very best of vineyards.

The construction of Hunter Valley Gardens, created by Bill Roche, started back in 1999 and were completed in 2003. Walk your way around 8 klms of pathways and see wonderful formal gardens which include an Indian mosaic garden, Chinese Moongate garden, an Italian grotto and a delightful Oriental garden. The maintainence of the gardens is seen to by 20-30 horticultural staff.

From the many photographs I took on our recent outing, I'd love to share so many showing various parts of the gardens. When I was browsing over the photos for this entry I decided to make it just .. a "Touch of Pink" theme.

I'll share more images from the Hunter Valley Gardens, on another post, at another time.

Paper Cutting: Creating your own

Since I can't draw, my way to try and design an original paper cut is by working with my photo-editing/graphics programme, PhotoImpact X3. With an idea in mind, and some bits and pieces found on royalty-free Dover cd's, I'm able to build my own "compilation" if you like. The result is nothing like the images that I took parts from.

With your graphics programme you can re-work the proportions of any shape to suit the design you have in mind, even erase parts you don't want to keep. Then, with some added path-shapes you can paste extras on to eventually build your very own design.

If only I had an inherent drawing/sketching gene, but this is the closest I can get to making my own images. If you paper-cut your own designs, I hope you'll share your method of creating your own here with your comments.