Flamingo Tongue Snail
Today's papercutting brought up all sorts of wonderings for me. I usually focus on fairly well-known animals; even if you didn't know the species of the dragonfly, you recognized it as a dragonfly, or if you didn't recognize the flowers in Cathy's garden, you recognized it as a garden.
An early hold-up-to-the-light-and-check-progress!
This one's not immediately recognizable to many people, which threw me in my thinking about it; how do I design a papercutting of an animal to be recognizable if it is not well-known? Is my goal to introduce people to something new? To create connection to new creatures? To make something lovely? (Okay, my goal was to make a birthday present for the delightful human who requested this animal; I didn't have to think this hard. But I can't help it!)
Flamingo tongue snails live in the western Atlantic/Caribbean, and are usually found on sea fans and sea whips. When I went on my first dive trip, I fell in love with them. They're... well, they're weird. They look beautiful, with their orange color with black spots, but that color is part of their mantle (squishy part) that they wrap around their shell. The shell isn't colorful at all! And if you touch them (I'm not encouraging this... just passing along information from my experience as a 16 year old quite-foolish diver!), they pull their mantle in, exposing the white shell underneath. It's fascinating to watch the color change.
So there were decisions to be made: Do I go with my usual black-and-white, emphasizing the shape and issuing myself a challenge of somehow clearly defining the snail from the coral, both of which are composed of spots, or do I include the brilliant colors that are characteristic of both the flamingo tongue snail (orange) and sea fans (purple)? Do I just add color to the snail? In the end, I went with black-and-white, but I might play with the design some more in the future. That's one of the reasons I love making digital designs! I can play with something that's already "finished" without losing the original.
My first thought when I lifted the transfer paper: Oh dear word I’ve gotten myself into another dragonfly situation.
I tried designing the flamingo tongue snail & sea fan on my computer first, which didn't work at all, and was frankly boring. After that failed attempt, I started out with a chalked hand-cutting, and then scanned it to create the design digitally. That brought up feelings about how I value what I make, and how what word I apply changes everything; was the hand cutting the "original", or the "draft"? Is a machine-cutting intrinsically lower-value? (I don't think so.) How much do I value how it was made versus valuing the final product? I do a mix of hand-cutting and machine-cutting, depending on what I feel like doing, the size of the product, the time I have to make it, the limitations of hand-cutting and the limitations of machine-cutting.
A concern with the creature: Could I clearly define its edges, when it has spots and the background is full of spots too?
I had a bit of a fight with myself; do I send the original/draft off, or do I send the machine-cut final/replica? In the end, I sent the machine-cut; I was happier with the changes I'd made, the cleanness of the cuts, and the overall appearance of it. Plus, I'd accidentally used a piece of paper that wasn't standard-sized as the top black layer of the original/draft, and straightening it out would never create a result I was happy with.
A spooked flamingo tongue snail!
Figuring out how to make the spots while hand-cutting was a new experience; I usually hand cut single layer projects, not multiple-layers. My goal was to have a top layer that was the fan/edge of snail, a second layer that was the outer edge of the snail's spots, a third layer that was the inside of the snail's spots, and a bottom layer that was solid for the center of the spots After a few attempts, I took my design, used graphite to transfer the circles to the white piece of paper, cut those shapes, then used a chalk pencil to transfer those circles to the second layer of black.
Flamingo tongue snail and sea fan draft
The final version!
It doesn't seem fair that I get so much out of making a birthday present, and the birthday person only gets the present! What a fun process, and I'm excited to see what comes of the various wonderings it brought up. And what a lovely bonus that the recipient loves it!