Cut Paper
- Matisse cut-outs
- paper collage
- decoupage style
Organic shapes cut with scissors, laid flat on colour, with the scissor marks left in.
Opens an image model with the prompt in it. The price is on the page before you sign in.
What it is for
Cut paper has the boldness of flat colour and the warmth of something made by hand, which is a combination almost nothing else offers.
It also reads from a long way off. Big simple shapes in strong colour are the most legible thing on any wall.
How it works
Cut, do not draw. Shapes are organic and slightly irregular, with visible scissor edges and the occasional nick.
Paint the paper first: flat gouache with a faint brush texture inside each shape, so the colour is not perfectly even.
Overlap the shapes on a strong flat coloured ground, never white, and add a soft paper shadow under each piece. Cut the letters from paper too.
When to use it
Use it for a summer festival, a dance performance, a children's event, a garden party, a swimming or seaside event, a gallery show.
Leave it alone when you need detail or text-heavy information. Scissors cannot do small.
Told apart from its neighbours
School cutout collage is deliberately childlike and uses torn sugar paper. Cut paper is a trained artist with sharp scissors.
Mid-century modern graphic looks cut but is printed, with overprint texture rather than paper shadows.
Contemporary flat illustration has perfect vector edges. Cut paper's edges wobble.
Where it was used
Matisse turned to cut paper in the 1940s when illness stopped him painting, and the Jazz portfolio of 1947 and The Snail of 1953 are the results. The Tate and MoMA retrospectives of 2014 put the technique back in front of every designer alive.
- Henri Matisse
- Jazz portfolio
- The Snail
The prompt
Replace the blanks with your own event, keep the rest. Then run it on an image model.
poster for <event>, Matisse cut paper collage, large organic shapes cut from painted paper with visible scissor edges and small nicks, flat unmodulated gouache colour with slight brush texture inside each shape, shapes overlapping on a strong flat coloured ground, leaf seaweed and dancing figure forms, a soft paper shadow under each piece, hand-cut paper letters, <date, time and place> cut from a strip of contrasting paper
What goes wrong
The model adds outlines around the shapes. Say there are no outlines at all and the edge is simply the cut.
The second failure is a white background. Ask for a strong flat coloured ground with shapes overlapping on it.
Leave out
outlines, gradients, fine detail, digital smoothness, white background
Watch for
No outlines anywhere. The edge of a shape is where the scissors went, nothing more.
Questions
Print it
Pay for the one run. No subscription, and the price is on the model page before you sign in.
Next to it in few inks, drawn by hand
