FACTORALY - E20 PAPER ART

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

This time we discuss how pretty paper can be. Whether it's folded, cut, curled, or mashed, paper is immensely versatile. Come in and listen to a little 'Silhouetta' of two men! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Hello everyone! Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of Factorily. So Bruce and I are both voiceover artists we spend an awful lot of time sitting in a box uh talking into a microphone with no one else in our lives at all um but every now and then we get together and we we discuss interesting random facts you say interesting it's open to interpretation i'm aware yes interesting to us yeah i mean i think honestly when you're doing these things you've got to be interested in in the stuff that you're talking about otherwise totally what's the point we have deleted a couple of episodes that turned

out to be utter codswallop yes um so yeah we only we only let the codswallop one was fine oh the codswallop one wasn't Codswallop, ironically. So, Bruce, tell our dear listeners what we're talking about this week. Right. Well, we were thinking about it and we decided to talk about paper. And that's a bit dull. Yeah. So we thought, what about things you can do with paper?

Paper art. Paper art. So this week's what about things you can do with paper? Paper art. Paper art. So this week's episode is all about paper art, things you can make with paper or do with paper that are arty or crafty or clever in some way or make more of that material. Indeed. My knowledge of paper art up until this point

was fairly minimalist. When you, Bruce, suggested let's do an episode on paper art, I instantly, I don't know what you originally thought as you were saying that. Did you have like sort of one keyword that popped up into your head when you said paper art? Yes, but it was the wrong one because I thought décolletage when I actually meant decoupage. And they are quite different. They are quite different, as I'm sure we'll soon find out. My instant thought when you said paper art was those Christmas decorations.

Yes. You know when you get several sheets of paper and you put them together, you fold them in half, and you cut out half of a Christmas tree or half of a snowman or half of a snowflake, and then you open them up and they make a sort of a 3mas tree or half of a snowman or half of a snowflake and then you open them up and they make a sort of a 3d fan shape yes thingy um my household as a child was full of these things and that's instantly where i i went when you said paper art i thought how the heck are we going to do an episode on that but there's more to it than that there is so much more so much more i mean i remember when i was a kid

doing a similar thing but with um little people holding hands oh yeah yeah i remember those you did them at school yes or paper chains yes paper chains at christmas getting your lips all covered in glue so what where should we start? Do you want to start with licking bits of paper or cutting bits of paper or folding bits of paper? Oof, crikey. Take your pick. Lick, fold or glue. Let's start with fold because I think that's the thing that people are going to go into first. It's the most obvious, isn't it? And origami.

Origami. What do you know about origami, Bruce? I know that I now know two more Japanese words than I did. Good. Ori and kami. Ori and kami, which is paper and fold. As literal as that, it means paper fold. Yes. Nice and easy. And it's probably about 2,000 years old. Crikey. Probably came from China. Basically, the first time that paper was invented.

In the invention of paper, the first invention of folding paper was probably there as well. And when you see that you can fold paper, you can do things with folded paper. Yes. But it's so expensive, paper, when it first comes out that you have to restrict it to very rich people or to very religious people. Yeah. So the monks would use origami to make religious symbolism and things like that right and it was very time consuming and if you're a monk you've got nothing but time so so that was done like two two thousand years ago but then modern origami has actually not been around for that long. Bond origami started in about 1880. Recent as that. Can you do any origami? I can't. I've tried many times. My son's

actually quite good at it. But no, I have no dexterity in my hands whatsoever. I mean, the only thing I can really do fast and well in origami is to make a paper airplane. Okay. Well, yeah, if we can classify paper airplanes as origami then i'm a master of origami oh no there you go well it's it is still folding paper it is isn't it yeah there are people who take it very seriously uh paper airplanes the the world record is held by three aerospace engineers the world record for the best paper airplane is it's about 280 feet goodness me which is nearly the length of a football oh crikey that's hand thrown yeah yeah there's not any not catapulted or anything yeah that's that's some very good engineering that took about six seconds to get to get that sort of nearly 300

feet but is that art or is that craft or is that science? Oh, or is there even a difference? So, Simon, you've always got good records on stuff. Have you got any good records on origami? Yes. Again, thanks to the Guinness Book of Records. The largest number of origami pieces collated together. This is impressive. 6,110 origami pieces collated together this is impressive 6 110 origami flowers were made and put together into one single art installation i suppose wow um they were created

by uh muri elementary school in japan just last year 2022 gosh Gosh, that's impressive stuff. It's a lot of origami. I mean, there are other sorts of folded paper that aren't origami. Right. Which I personally think are incredibly artistic. And that is the pop-up book. Not for a second did I think you would be bringing pop-up books into this. I mean, the pop-up book is something that is a work of art. I mean, there are book collectors that actually collect very early pop-up books.

And there are also some sort of fairly modern ones that have sort of limited edition that have become quite rare. But the pop-up book was first invented a lot longer ago than you might think 1240 crikey there was a a guy called matthew paris in 1240 who he had a book that had like rotating wheels within wheels you know those books that you kind of yes can a wheel in a pop-up book? And it was used to calculate holidays and to do various sort of like religious things. Oh, so it was functional. It was a working tool. It wasn't just for lols.

No, it was almost like a slide rule. Oh, brilliant. But, you know, children obviously love a pop-up book. And the first kids' pop-up books were sort of around about in the 1700s well um and they were called lift the flap and they're very basic so basic so you had like multiple layers of paper that were cut yes and you could ask a question and then lift a flap and see an answer underneath yes okay but they they also used that technology slightly earlier, actually, in about 1600s, to demonstrate anatomy. So they would have pop-up books with layers. So you could kind of like peel the skin off and then peel the musculature

off and then look at the innards. They were actually used as instruction books for medical students and surgeons. As guidebooks. As guidebooks. So rather than actually having to cut real people up, you could just do it in paper. Also in the 1800s, for children, they came up with ones where you can actually take little figures out of the book that popped up. And then there was clothing that went on the figure that matched the story that was in the book. Oh, I have a vague recollection of that from my childhood yeah well my sister used to get a magazine i think called

bunty a comic called bunty i've heard of that and on the back page i think it had like a uh like a cut out character that you could then dress up right in various different outfits huh um i don't know why i remember that probably because i used to steal her copy of bunty and she used to steal my copy of tiger and jag oh sounds like the affair that my action man had with my sister cindy i have a pop-up book myself, which is called the Formula One Pack. The most comprehensive, interactive 3D study on motor racing ever. Wow.

And I will show this to Simon, and then we will see what his reaction is. I'm excited already. Nice, yes. Okay, so there's a racing car that's popped up with little facts about it. All very simple. And oh my goodness me. Okay, that's a very racing car that's popped up with little facts about it. All very simple. And oh my goodness me. Okay, that's a very different page. Crikey, so that's the central console of a racing car.

Yeah. That's just popped up in the middle of the book. Oh, wow. An actual F1 car. A whole Ferrari. Whoa. That's impressive. I don't even understand the mechanics of how that works in the page. That's just bizarre.

It's a fabulous book. I've had it for a few years. It was a present. And this is one of the books I would never part with. Brilliant. You'll have to upload a photo of that if our listeners go to our website, factorally.com. There is a page there where we're putting up photos, maps, images, all of the things that you sadly can't see that we're describing to you. You can go and see them on our website. So hopefully that book will make it there. I will make sure that there is something referring to the book. Brilliant. So Simon, what's your take on paper art?

Well, so following on from folding paper, one of the other things you can do is to cut paper. You said Japanese origami means fold paper. Kirigami means to cut paper. And I had no idea that this was even a thing until quite recently. One of my ongoing voiceover jobs is to provide examples of English dialogue for Chinese children learning English. And these scripts keep on talking about paper cutting. His hobby is paper cutting. I'm going to do some paper cutting. idea what this referred to so i went on a jolly jaunt online to find out and um it's it's a whole thing it's probably quite obvious now that i've found it because i recognize what it looks like but essentially one single sheet of paper with lots of delicate intricate cuts using either

scissors craft knives tiny little scalpels to make a beautiful picture um and this originated in in china you know as you said that's pretty much where paper comes from and therefore an awful lot of the paper arts come from that area as well yes um this particular form of paper cutting there's a there's a style of it called um zian ze and zian ze was created in the fourth century uh fourth or fifth century in china and essentially it started off as a template for embroidery so people would cut out these pictures from a single sheet of paper and lay them onto a piece of fabric as a template for embroidery and then sooner or later people realized actually these are pretty nice just on their own regardless of the embroidery so they started

making these things and it's a whole pastime it's a whole industry in china and japan as well now but originally in china you can just buy these beautiful elaborate intricate pieces of artwork and they're often sort of focused around uh chinese uh culture so you know there are lots of dragons there are lots of zodiac signs there are lots of mountains and flowers and things like that, that are just so intricate and beautiful. And this paper cutting has since made its way to all parts of the world, Indonesia, the Philippines, Poland, Israel, Sweden, Switzerland, all of these places have their own very unique take on paper cutting. And they're just stunning um the largest ever i've been i've been dipping into the guinness book of records a lot recently i love this website

um the largest ever piece of paper cutting was rectangular in shape one meter wide by 143 meters long that's that's longer than wallpaper oh oh yeah it's a lot longer than wallpaper um and you know this thing took an entire team of it's it's sort of it's the length of the bio tapestry if not longer yeah all made out of of cut out paper you know it's um it's incredible what story does it tell i didn't get as far as looking that up. It was just pretty. Just pretty. Fair enough. Because you can also scroll paper. There's a thing called quilling. There is.

Where you kind of like, you sort of score the back of a piece of paper to turn it into like a spiral curve and then do things with it that way. Yeah. But the kirigami or the kigiri or whatever it is. Yeah, kirigami. the kigiri or whatever it is yeah kirigami is is brilliant it's incredible um quilling itself is something that i had never heard of until recently um do you know why it's called quilling is it because you use feathers yeah you take a little strip of paper about a centimeter in diameter um can you have a diameter of something that's rectangular width you take a piece of paper that's about a centimeter in width and um you wrap it around a quill a feather and it turns

it into a nice little coiled up spiral and you arrange these things edgeways on so you put them on a surface um you know sideways on so that they actually raise off the surface of the frame or the wood or the paper or whatever it is that you're laying it onto. And it creates this beautiful 3D piece of artwork with shadows and texture and very pretty. I found out that there are some technical

terms for quilling. There are different shapes, different basic shapes that you can quill paper into. These consist of a tight coil, loose coil, teardrop, marquess, heart, loose scroll, C scroll. No, not that kind of C scroll. S scroll, heart scroll and spiral. And you can put these things all together and they've been inlaid into furniture, into trinket boxes or just onto a framed sheet of paper for its own sake

for art's sake um yeah beautiful things yeah i mean we should we should put some uh pictures up in the show notes absolutely so put up a picture of this one the largest ever piece of quilling uh 19 meters by 15 meters and it's a depiction and it's blooming accurate it's a depiction of van gogh's starry night wow made entirely out of coiled and spiraled little strips of paper somebody had way too much time on their hands they did um this was created by a team of years ago. Stunning. One subject that I didn't look at, talking of cutting paper, which was very popular because you weren't really allowed to make portraits of people in France, was this chap called Silhouette? Yes. I don't know whether you've done any research on silhouette because i

haven't i just know that there are people who can take a small pair of scissors and make a thing that looks like my face absolutely um this is this is the joy dear listeners of the partnership between bruce and myself whatever one of us hasn't got around to researching through no method of coordination whatsoever nine times out of ten it turns out the other person has done that research so we feel in each other's i have hey i went down that route yeah um so silhouette uh silhouette was a a french gentleman um whose name was etienne de silhouette and he was a a minister a finance minister and around the seven years war uh they were having some financial difficulties and in 1759 monsieur silhouette imposed a little bit of austerity on

the french people and because of that the word silhouette became synonymous with doing things on the cheap essentially um and during that period of time you know lots of i was gonna say cuts that's way too obvious a pun were being made um and people were using cut out pieces of paper or or card at least to make little portraits so those who couldn't afford to have a portrait painter create a beautiful little miniature of their loved ones to put inside a pendant or a locket. People started making these portraits out of paper and they were just black, just no detail, but an incredibly detailed outline,

but no detail within the image itself. They were originally called profiles or shades. But eventually, because they were the cheap version of portraiture, they became known as silhouettes after Monsieur de Silhouette. I say these things are done on the cheap and much easier than a portrait and so on, but you can really tell the image of the person that the likeness portrays. They're incredibly detailed. Tearing up bits of paper, obviously, is something that you need to do to make papier-mâché.

Papier-mâché? I never thought of doing any research on papier-mâché. Oh, don't worry, Simon. I've been there. There we go. I've gone down that rabbit hole. In that Oh, don't worry, Simon. I've been there. There we go. I've gone down that rabbit hole. In that case, after you could, sir. Well, papier-mâché is one of those things that has been around a long time because it's a cheap way of making something that's solid. I don't know whether you, as a child, made papier-mâché heads using a balloon. Yes, certainly, yes. So you inflated a balloon, you wrapped it in wet, gluey paper, and then you had the fun of popping the balloon

and peeling it out from the inside after the papier-mâché had set. Yes, that's right. So, yes, popping the balloon was the fun bit. And it's just one of those materials that it's not toxic, so kids can use it. It's not limited by size, so you can get up as big as you like. I mean, the biggest papier-mâché thing that I found is in Phuket. And it's an elephant wearing a top hat.

Really? And it's 19 feet high. No. Yeah. It's 19 feet long and about 15 feet wide. Papier-mâché, the whole thing. And then there's those heads that they wear at carnivals. Oh, yeah, of course.

All sorts of things. A lot of papier-mâché turns up in carnivals. Right. Just have to hope it doesn't rain. I'm assuming papier-mâché is French for mashed paper it is it is great how literal and i'm sure sure it's known by other names in other countries i do know what it's called in south america because they because they use it to make a thing do they now the thing that they make isn't mexican okay so um it's actually a piñata oh i would have got there

if you're giving me the time but did you know that piñatas aren't originally mexican no i didn't where are they from china of course it is of course the pin the piñata is naturally from china right marco polo brought this idea of of um piñatas back from china to italy right where they were they were seen as being great fun in a harvest thing where you you hit the evil and release the good oh how nice and they used to be made of pot okay these days they're mostly made of of lacquered papier-mâché or they're made of pots that are days they're mostly made of of lacquered papier mache or they're made of pots that are actually decorated with ribbons of paper okay and they are beautiful and they have a proper piñata has seven points and they're supposed to be like the seven deadly sins okay the other thing that's a clue to their origin is a lot of piñatas are shaped like animals, for example, bears, cows.

Yes. Things to do with the Chinese calendar. Very good. Right. See, my limited experience of piñatas comes from children's birthday parties, often shop-bought from a local supermarket chain, and then they're almost invariably donkeys, because what could be more Mexican than a donkey? And therefore, it's never occurred to me that they

came in other animal forms, let alone that they would be representative of Chinese culture. How interesting. I think that's all I have to say about paper art. What about you, Simon? Yeah, I think I'm spent on that as well. I'm now lacquered. I'm machayed. We've stepped up to the crease. We've put ourselves into the fold. So all we have to do now is to cut this down to the required time,

and we're away. Thank you very much for listening i mean we've really enjoyed having you here well no we haven't because you're not here you're here with us in spirit do you ever wonder where people are when they're listening to us yeah frequently i think they can probably tell us that in the comments in the comments i think they can that's that's what they're there for so there we we go. That has been Fact or Early. I've been Simon Wells. I've been Bruce Fielding.

And you've been our listeners. Thank you. Thank you for being our listeners. We do appreciate it. Indeed. Come back again soon. Au revoir. Bye bye.