346 - Cut and Stencil

1994: second year at art college. Paper cut with a sharp knife. Paint stippled onto paper through the holes. Stencil paintings.

The idea was inspired by Mexican tissue paper banners 'Papel picado', used for Day of the Dead (Día de Muertos) festivities.

Here is one of the paper sheets after being cut and stippled with paint, then peeled off the canvas.

This is an exciting image and links directly to the pattern work I'm doing now. It was totally spontaneous: I just sat down and sketched it fluently with no edits.

This is an experiment I must have done later on, using Illustrator to wobble the shapes. I didn't use Adobe software much at college in 1994, because we barely had access to computers over at the Charing Cross Road campus. The machines had barely any RAM and we had 3.5 inch floppy disks with 160kb of storage to save our work. So this would have been post college.