Birthday card for Andy

This week it is my son's friend Andy's birthday so I have made him a special card and gift. I'll show you the gift at a later time, now we will concentrate on how to do the card.

What you will need

Printer
Black paper
printer paper
cutting mat
scalpel
coloured paper
spray glue
glue stick
toothpicks
patience

How to make it

My free drawing skills aren't the best so I had a look through google images for the perfect image. I came to the conclusion that colouring pages for kids are in general pretty good for using for the base. Once I had found this image of George with balloons I went to photoshop to add the text, when doing text with papercutting it is important to make sure that the letters join up. Once having figured out my design I mirror imaged it before printing out (this is an important step!)

Now we are ready to transfer the image. I used a pen and carbon paper to transfer the mirrored image onto the black piece of paper. As it was quite a few lines to copy I stuck my pieces of paper down with a couple of pieces of cello tapes, after all the last thing I wanted was for my papers to move and lines not join up! The second image (excuse the flash, it was late at night) shows what it looked like once I had copied it all onto the black paper. I had to do some adjustments to the text as I was copying it all to make sure that they were joining up with each other.

So then when all lines were copied the slow process of cutting out all the little lines started. The first image shows mid cut when I was trying to figure out which colours to use for George. Second image shows when it was all cut out. Then after that is when all the fun stuff started and I didn't have a chance to take photos. The system that worked best for me was using a glue stick for attaching all the minor pieces but spreading out with a tooth pick! This is because if you use the whole glue stick you risk breaking your pretty cut out shapes, this I learned the hard way! I cut out squares in the colours i wanted to approximately fit the hole they were going to fill and then cut off the excess past the black lines using my scalpel. Once all the colours were done I used my spray glue and pastened the image to the card! The only thing on the image that isn't cut out in paper is George's facial features as I deemed it too tricky so I hand drew them onto his face instead.

Happy crafting!