Paper Panda’s Guide to Papercutting

Paper Panda, aka Louise Firchau, is a papercutting superstar, with thousands of fans worldwide eager to purchase her distinctive and highly sought after papercut designs. In this gorgeous book, she shows you not only how its done in easy-to-follow steps, but also provides over 20 papercutting templates to try out for yourself. The book begins with a design section in which Paper Panda provides a personal account of what inspires her, how she works, and how Paper Panda came about. This is followed by the techniques section, in which step-by-step demonstrations illustrate various techniques, including infilling. There follows a fascinating insight into how the author creates finished artwork suitable for papercutting, then how to make the template itself, and how to use the finished papercut to make cards, framed pictures, and so on.

There are 20 papercut projects in the book; five from Paper Panda herself and five each from three of Paper Pandas friends and colleagues (Sarah Trumbauer, Louise Dyer and Suzy Taylor) all accomplished papercutters in their own rights. Each project consists of a template, which is reproduced at full-size at the back of the book, and a finished paper cut, together with some simple instructions. The designs are simple enough for beginners, though attractive and interesting enough to inspire more advanced papercutters. The projects themselves include cards, decorations, and mounted and framed pictures to hang on the wall, all using a variety of coloured and patterned papers to show off Paper Panda and friends distinctive and beautiful designs to their best advantage.

After leaving school, Louise Firchau studied art and design, art history, illustration and typography, and enjoyed card making, glass painting and sketching. In 2000 she was inspired to start paper cutting, and in 2010 she started her own online company called Paper Panda with over 270,000 follows on Facebook, making typographical lyrical paper cuts from recycled paper. Since then Paper Panda has grown enormously and she now sells paper cuts and giftware in a range of distinctive styles. Louise has a huge following and has taught thousands of people to paper cut though online groups using her paper cutting starter kit, which she also sells from her on-line shop.