Canvas to the Imagination

I am pleased to present this recent commission I completed last week for Earnest Ice Cream. The piece was installed in the shop last Saturday morning and will be on permanent display.

Ben and Erica reached out to me over the summer about creating artwork for their new scoop shop that opened on Fraser Street in August. As our discussions began about what sort of work they wanted for the shop I had just done the first experiment of translating my paper cut designs into laser cut wood, and this is what they chose to go with.

Because their budget was limited we chose the design from existing paper cut work, which you can see in my portfolio. From there I scanned the work in two pieces (because it was too large for the scanner), then assembled and cleaned it up in Photoshop.

The most involved bit of work in this process was creating a clean outline of the design using Illustrator. I don’t have a lot of experience using this software so my friend Kirsti kindly gave me a crash course in what I needed to know. I used the trace function to create the outline but it was hours (and hours) of tedious work to clean it up into something usable.

This is a key step because the laser cutter works with vector files, and the cleaner the outline, the better the final product.

The finished piece is cut from bamboo plywood, and was fabricated by Hopewell Works Ltd. This is a laser cutting and engraving fabrication studio, located right in my neighbourhood, and I was referred to by Derek of Laser Cutter Cafe. The people at Hopewell Works really know their stuff, and it was great to work with them.

It was a huge learning curve to figure out how to make this piece, and I could not have done it without the help of Boris, Arnt, Val, and Kirsti. Each one of them shared their knowledge with me, or lent a hand in some essential way.

I’m jumping ahead a bit in sharing new work for the Circles and Animals series. I actually completed The Mouse after two other pieces in the series I have yet to share. This was commissioned by a client who was looking for new artwork to hand in their new Gastown offices.

I shared a few options for paper cutting work with the client and he decided to go with a circle cut layered piece featuring a mouse. He’s pretty darn cute, and I’m surprised I didn’t think of this animal sooner for the series.

One thing of note about this piece is, I went back and re-did the tail after the pieces were already assembled and glued. It was a bit of tricky business to cut away the original tail from the mouse and reattach the new one, all without wrecking the piece in the process.

As of last week, The Mouse hangs in its new home in The Jibe offices in Gastown. Check out more work from the Circles and Animals series I’ve shared previously -> (Fox, Snail, Owl, Crow, Koi)

A few times a year I arrange to trade work with other artists. It goes something like this: they like my artwork, and I like their artwork and so we work out a deal and make an exchange of work.

My most recent trade is with origami artist, Joseph Wu. Over the last few years he’s very generously given me a few pieces, including the two lovebirds he made in memorial to Yuuki, and the lunar new year water dragon pictured below.

It was only after I commissioned Joseph to create an origami portrait of my friend’s dog for his fortieth birthday that we agreed to do an exchange for one of my paper cut pieces.

I took a short video on Instagram as I was working on the paper cut piece:

The finished size is 10″ x 10″, and is made up of two separate sections cut from a single piece of paper. The tricky part was mounting these into the cradle frame without destroying the work because there wasn’t a lot of room to maneuver.

It’s a lovely continuation of my Wind and Water paper cut series. Now I just need to get it into Joseph’s hands.