This weekend I attended the Nikki McClure workshop at the Bellevue Arts Museum. Nikki is a fantastic instructor and the fourteen students were all very talented. It was great to see a bunch of amazing and inspiring pieces at the end of the day.

Nikki began with a quick history and tour of papercut samples from around the world. It turns out the oldest known papercut is from fifth century China. The art of papercut has spread throughout cultures around the world, but it is especially prevalent in Japan.

Nikki did a demo of her technique and then we tried an exercise cutting a pattern that transitioned from black to white. Nikki’s example was leaves of a bush that started out thick and mostly black at one end and then gradually thinned out to white sky at the other end. I chose to use the reflection of pine trees in a pond for my exercise.

After the exercise, we spent the rest of the morning drawing our ideas for the afternoon project. I brought a lot of reference material, but in the end decided to work from a photograph of a couple crossing a busy street at night during a blizzard in Boston. The picture was challenging to render in just black and white, so I ended up something that was very stylized.

Probably the biggest challenge was getting enough white behind the couple so that some of their silhouettes would show up. Before cutting I did some experiments to see how I could make the headlights spill more white into the scene behind the people. The most promising approach was to add white streaks of snow around the headlights. I didn’t have time for this much cutting during the workshop so I just simplified.

I liked the final result and think that if I have some time to revisit the picture I can make something more faithful to that stormy day.