How to Make Mattise Paper Cut-Outs Part 1

You’ve been wondering what to do with all those scraps of color paper you have lying around the house? Well, I’ve got my motivation and inspiration found an artist named Henri Matisse.

When he got quite elderly he can no longer paint. So he started doing these paper cut-outs. And what he would do will be to sit in his wheelchair and he would cut out all of these interesting shapes and then he would have his helpers there to go and pin the shapes up on a huge sheet of background paper that he’d have hang it on the wall. And they would keep moving them around and placing them until he decided where he wanted them to stay permanently.

He did a whole series of these paper cut-outs and many of them had been turned into stained glass window designs, interior walls and building. And some would even then turn them into carpets for large buildings also. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to start with a stack of scraps of papers here and a white sheet of paper for our background and I want to choose a color scheme.

And I also want to talk a little bit about some of the shapes that Matisse liked to use. He would have this kind of leaf like shapes often. He would have a tree like shapes. He would use circles and triangles. He would use zigzags, arrows, and this kind of pineapple shape. And you’ll notice when you see his cut-outs that he repeats a lot of shapes over and over again.

So what I’m going to do here is use these colors, the red, black, blue and yellow. And what I like to do when I start doing this is maybe put two sheets of paper together or even fold it over double so that you’ve cut-out several of the same shape all at once and I just kind of start cutting. But if you want to you can use a pencil and draw your shapes first. And what I’m trying to do right now is make kind of a leaf, leaf type shape. And I also like to just cut up several or a lot of shapes because then when you start arranging them on the piece of paper you can kind of pick and choose and add some and take some off and you have enough shapes to work with. I want to do something.

So now, we’ve got four of the same shape if we choose to use all the four of them. Maybe we’ll cut out several different sizes of kind of round shapes. They don’t have to be perfect. I’ve got quite a few shapes here to work with and I even saved. Actually this was what was cut away, the negative space and I thought that may kind of fun to use maybe in the center and maybe I could do something kind of symmetrical. So I’m just kind of play around, just moving shapes into different places and see how it looks.

I think I’m going to go ahead and start to glue this down. And you can use the twisty glue sticks for your gluing or you could use Elmer’s glue. I like to use polymer medium, I used that for a lot of things. I just think it glue things down and very flat, you don’t get any ripples. So I’m just going to go ahead and start to glue my shapes in the place.

And you just do it one at time and hope that you’ll get it on the right spot that you have chosen. These are just leftover pieces from cutting out, all this. And I think I may just go ahead and glue these little pieces down then I think it’s finished. So at this point, I’m going to say goodbye and finish my gluing and wish you luck on your Matisse cut-out.