Sorry for the silence last week, folks! My hands have been busy at work on some new papercuttings that I just can't wait to share with you!

This week I put the finishing touches on the next installment of my Water Spirits series: naiads! Naiads originate in ancient Greek mythology, though have popped up all over the place since then, such as in pre-Raphaelite art like this painting by John William Waterhouse:

Unlike nereids, naiads are fresh water spirits, generally presiding over a spring, waterfall, stream, or pool. Mostly though, I just wanted an excuse to paint cute pink water lilies. I'm such a sucker for cute and pink.

This is definitely my favorite papercutting to date and I look forward to doing more like this! It has a lot more depth in person and is mounted in a shallow shadow-box frame so that you can peer in at different angles and see all sorts of fun details! And to think, it all started as this incredibly messy sketch:

Here are some behind the scenes looks at the naiads before they were quite so pretty:

Cutting all the cutouts in the hair is really fun, though gets pretty hard on my hands after a while. Thank goodness for bubble baths!

Ta-da! Not nearly so weird and alien-looking now. I always start with my characters first and then build the back/foregrounds around them. It helps me establish the mood of the piece along with the color scheme.

I'll post sneak peeks of the next papercutting in this series soon! I promise, it'll be a fun one ;)