I feel I have made a great amount of progress throughout the third year so far in relation to my personal and professional development. I have contacted designers and artists to talk about my work and have started making some great contacts that I can ask for advice on my work, the industry and any technical questions.
Firstly, last year I developed my paper cutting skills using a craft knife and the laser cutter, by designing a series of typographic lampshades that could be customized to the clients initial of their first name and I did this as I wanted to use paper cutting as a technique, but giving it a commercial aspect. To help with the paper lampshade designs and all the finer details of making lampshades I found a contact, who lives in works in hebden bridge and was happy to help, and this was also the start of me contacting practicing designers. Now I have a greater understanding of the materials and processes used I can create these designs to a more professional standard, which is what I will be doing with the letter ‘H’ lampshade as it was specifically requested from someone who had seen the design of the ‘A’ Other skills I have developed this year are bookbinding, hand embossing and digitally printing onto textiles. I would like to develop my bookbinding skills more as this is a format I would like to produce my portfolio in, which could then be easily posted or taken to clients for them to handle as I think this is important with my work.
As the year progressed I started to contact more and more designers, illustrators and artists such as Matt Lyons, Matt Williams,and Jen Collins. I have spoken to them about my designs as well as other things such as how to charge clients, resources for freelancers and other things like that, and I did all this through twitter on which I have had some great opportunities.
Some of the other designers, artists and bloggers I contacted are -
* Hannah Nunn – Who helped me with the lampshade designs
* Peter Crawley – who creates stitched illustrations
* Amy Ng – who runs an illustration blog and has helped me with my dissertation too.
* Rebecca Lowrey Boyd – who I contacted to feature my papercuts and was named 25 out 50 best design blogs by the times online.
* Meighan O'Toole – who runs the art and culture blog My love for you is a stampede of horses and writes a blog for the magazine juxtapoz.
* Jan – who runs a Canadian design blog called poppytalk.
From contacting these designers and bloggers, my work has started to get noticed and I have had one of my typographic paper cut quotes featured on the website welovetypography.com. Since I have started contacting designers and my work has started to get noticed, an online magazine called cut- click asked me to be part of an exhibition they were holding that was to do with mail art, like envelopes, postcards and stamps and I submitted, an oversized stamp paper cut, along with an oversized paper cut postcard, which was used for the press release of the exhibition.
Last year I found it really useful contacting designers directly for personal work as some of my paper cut designs, were spotted by a gallery owner who wanted to stock them in her gallery shop called Welcome Home in Glasgow and having these stocked in a shop, having the owner as a client or customer has meant I have had to consider things like invoices, receipts and packaging. Alongside this I have also started selling my paper cut designs and have created personalised silhouettes, which I see as a start to using paper cuts in a commercial way. I have uploaded a few of my paper cuts I created over xmas to the website society6 and this website has also given me some great opportunities. I am currently in collaboration with Society6 & the magazine idN as they are creating a book of work from a select few designers and artists from the website society6. As I have started to sell more designs I decided that I needed to develop my personal brand and identity so I have had a business Card and some promotional postcards printed. I am also in the process of developing packaging and stationery for my brand, which will include a traditional rubber stamp of my logo and contact details. I also have started researching suppliers for quality envelopes, tags, packaging material and papers to have a more professional appearance as a brand.
This year I would like to focus on using my paper cut skills in a more commercial way by focusing on promotional deigns for brands, editorial work and advertising of high end products. This could include window displays for retail, or by creating a promotional campaign such as the one for John Lewis that was illustrated using paper cuts, by Kate Forrester, so this year I just want to narrow my focus to using paper as a main medium and advertising and promotion as a topic.