I’ve been going through an odd Scandanavian phase this past week. I finally picked up ‘The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” to read (although I initially only started reading it because my colour coordinated bookcase needed more yellow and it was a book with a yellow spine…) and I couldn’t put it down. I raced through the trilogy in one weekend, and then got hungry for (and consumed) food from IKEA, listened to Royksopp, Kings of Convienience, and Mando Diao, and started watched The Killing. Now that I’m starting to awake from my Scandi-coma, I started thinking about Scandanavian art and patterns, and paper cutting. It made me think about an idea I’d like to try for work, so I set to making lots of fruit and fruit slices out of layered paper.

First things first- a selection of thick colourful paper card:

Then I started cutting out shapes to create the fruit:

Wood glue worked well to hold the small pieces together without soaking the card and causing it to bend.

After creating lots of pieces, I started playing around with the layout of them on my work surface:

Here they are divided by colour:

And mixed in like a big colourful fruit salad:

The thought I had for work involves a “canvas” sized 620mm x 940mm so I reduced that and set about using the fruit to create a frame:

The images came out a bit flat, so I added some tacks and folded paper to the back of some of the fruits to give it a bit more lift:

Here’s the finished frame, and now to work on the final image!