Attempting to papercraft, part 2 (Patreon)

This week I wrapped up my experiment in papercraft/paper cutting from last week. Read part 1 here! 

I was pretty intimidated by the idea of cutting out the lineart, but thankfully I had learned enough tips from experimenting on scrap paper last week. It's not perfect, but it looks aight from a distance and we take those.

I'm particularly proud that the details on the eyes and mouth came out well, but other details weren't so lucky. With the really small details like her choker and the triangles on her sweater, I couldn't get the cutout lineart to look nice enough. So instead, I just outlined the colored shapes itself with my black Micron pens (a relic from my traditional art days).

Left to right: the template, the cutout attempt, the final shape with a drawn border, and a smaller version of the final shape.

(I have no idea what this metal tool is originally intended for. I found it in a body care kit and it's probably for something gross but I've never used it until now where I held down the tiny paper while inking the border.)

With that, here are pretty much all the pieces laid out!

For the pink skin shade I only colored in the part of the skin that will be seen, hence the two tones.

With the cutting finally complete, I just had to assemble everything. Theoretically gluing everything together should have gone without a hitch, but as I put everything together something didn't feel right...

Basically, the cool part about papercraft is layering paper to add depth to otherwise flat art. But with my current pieces, these subtle shadows and dimensions are lost because of all the black lines. The stark black color just overrides any shadows you'd see. 

What this means is that my pieces are looking rather flat - no, even worse, from a distance they just look like I've printed them out. The painstaking hours I spent cutting out the lineart ended up being not just worthless but potential sabotagery... 

It's not so bad in the right lighting, but I definitely don't think it was worth all the time I spent cutting out the lines. I could have easily gotten the same effect starting with a black shape then layering colored shapes on top, which although would have used up a LOT of black would have taken much less time. On the bright side, at least I got some good experience with the X-Acto knife. 

(Oh, side note - since these were cut out by hand, the shapes obviously did not line up perfectly. In most cases I could cut away the excess, but in some cases the difference was so slight I didn't think it was worth it to try cutting - in those cases I used a black Prismacolor marker to recolor the parts jutting out so it blended in with the lineart :P)

At least the foam tape added some depth.

Surprisingly foam tape in itself had a learning curve. It is extremely sticky, and attempting to cut with scissors left obnoxious residue on the blades and sometimes butchered the tape squares I wanted. For the first part of the assembly process I sawed away at the foam tape with my X-Acto blade instead for more precise squares, but this was incredibly time-consuming and still left residue on the blades.

Thankfully, I found a video that offered some helpful tips.

• One tip was to lay out the tape on wax paper before cutting, as wax paper would allow the tape to stick temporarily like sticker paper. This made it much easier for me to cut with scissors, which saved me a lot of time. 
• I only had parchment paper but it worked well for this. I did have some qualms about wasting this much paper because it's not recyclable, so I tried to use each scrap of paper to cut foam squares multiple times.
• There was still residue on the scissors, albeit it built up much more slowly. Rubbing alcohol did not work as a cleaner, and the video did recommend a specific cleaner for crafts. I didn't have that cleaner but I did have an adhesive cleaner called Goo-Gone, and one wipe with that easily cleaned off everything.

And here's Okayu all assembled together!

She's a little more 3D now, but yeah, now I understand why most paper cutout art is lineless, or lines only, but not both. I considered redoing her to be lineless, but 1) recutting everything at this point sounded like a pain in the ass and 2) I didn't want my cutout lineart to go to waste. Thankfully my boyfriend (who will be the recipient of this gift) doesn't have high standards for art 🤭

Onto the backdrop - originally, my plan was to have the window in front of Okayu and the stained glass panels behind her. However, Okayu was so thique that to put the window on top of her would have required an absurd amount of foam tape, i.e. an absurd amount of time. Not to mention it wouldn't have been very stable, and the foam tape is white so it would totally detract from the color scheme. 

(My attempt with the window in front of Okayu. I tried to use a minimal amount of foam tape but you can see from the uneven surface of the window that this just wasn't going to be stable. I ended up ripping off all this foam tape and it went to waste, but it was better to cut my losses here before it was too late.)

Instead, I assembled the backdrop first and put Okayu in front of everything, which is not only more structurally sound but also puts Okayu more in the focus, so I'm ok with that.

You'll notice in the photo of all the paper parts that I did redeem last week's triangle debacle and cut out a better triangle for the Hololive logo. However, I ended up not using it as I found that directly cutting out the lilac shapes and pasting them on the purple triangle as fake cutouts had a much neater look, as shown here. Again, it indicates how pointless it is to do all these detailed cutouts lol...but it was pretty good experience with the X-Acto knife so I'd say it was worth it. Even if I did switch to lineless papercraft, there would no doubt still be some cutouts I could not avoid.

And with that, here's the final result!

I'm being a little hard on myself when it comes to the choice of including lineart, but overall it came out pretty decent in the photos and I'm pleased with this being my first attempt. It's so nice to have traditional art in my hands again! 

I also timed how long the whole process took, and it was about 35 hours from thumbnailing to editing the photo. I think it would be much faster if I did lineless art, which is what I would do if I were to take another stab at this. I still like the concept of the stained glass windows and I think the black borders of stained glass work best with the lineart, but I have some ideas on how to make the stained glass borders work with lineless art. 

So, do I want to do this again? Absolutely. I had SO much fun working on this compared to my usual art, and it feels more worthwhile to me than a single layered traditional artwork. I would love to make more fanart in this style, but I could see myself turning fashion designs into papercraft too which would be all the more interesting.

But will I do this again? I think I'm gonna see how much traction this gets when I share this publicly. If enough people on social media are interested I'd be down to do another Hololive vtuber (I have another friend I can throw art at, haha). I had a lot of fun working on this, but it is technically taking away time from the game I'm working on and hoping to sell. So I'd prefer to pursue papercraft if I knew it was something I could sell as well - I know it's shallow, but I can see the cost of the materials adding up and there would be so many piles of papercraft crowding my place if I wasn't able to sell them.

If any patrons are interested in making this themselves I'm happy to share the templates I made, but they are a little sloppy because I wasn't intending to distribute them...also I were to redo this I would make Okayu lineless which means I'd have to redraw the templates entirely, methinks. So I consider the templates outdated at this point. That said, if you still want the templates as is, you can comment and let me know!