In the beginning of 2025 I made a decision to get back into creating art after a 10 year hiatus while I was getting my Nursing degree. Art had to take a couple steps back as the time I had was dedicated to studying and working (but that is another story). When I decided to get back into art, I wanted to see if I could make it as an artist. So I decided to go to my paper cut style because I feel like it is a unique enough style that can easily be recognized as “my style”. For this first piece back, my goal was to do a well known subject that is big and complicated to give me an idea of how long a piece like this would take so if I had any commissioning requests I could give the collector an honest estimate of how long it would take me to complete. While looking for a subject, I wanted to appeal to a younger crowd. Until this time, my other cut portraits were people of older TV shows, movies and music, but instead of looking into the past, I decided to try and do a piece that was more in the present. That is when I decided to pick Taylor Swift as a subject because at that time she was all over the news and music scene. Taylor had the recognition I was looking for in a piece, and her lavish outfits adorn with millions of sequins, would make this the most complicated piece I had done up to this point.

While looking through hundreds of photos of Taylor Swift, I felt drawn to this one, as I feel it best portrays who Taylor is. (Now, full disclosure, I do not listen to Taylor Swift, I maybe know a handful of songs at best, so I am not at all an expert.) The first thing I loved about this pose, is Taylor’s arm flex. I felt that this was not a show of her physical strength, but of her strength as a musician and as an influencer. She has millions of followers, she has over 100 million albums sold, she has one of the most successful music tours ever, and that is her flex of strength. This arm flex also feel like a challenge to anyone who dares to cross her path. She knows what she can, and has accomplished, and she knows she will win every time. It is that confidence that can also been seen in her face in this piece. Taylor’s eyes and her iconic bright red lipstick, shouting to the world that she is on top, she is the best. If all of that does not deter you from challenging her, in this pose, she has her microphone at the ready in her right hand, like an old western outlaw ready to draw her revolver in a standoff. This is the feeling I got off of this one pose over all of the pictures I saw of Taylor Swift. (Credit to the Associated Press that took the original photo)

While this piece was my re-introduction into creating art, I did have a few artistic challenges I wanted to try with this piece. First, this was going to be one of the biggest pieces I have done so far. For these portraits I use 12×12 inch scrapbooking cardstock paper so having pieces to cut larger than that, I have to put two or three pieces together to create the right size to fit the shape, but this creates a seam in the paper. The biggest challenge is trying to hide these seams, so that they do not distract from the overall piece. However, sometimes it cannot be completely hidden so it is a matter of making them as minimum as possible. The second challenge I wanted to accomplish is to create a section with multiple colors. Before this piece, each section would have the different color values of the section in the main color. For example if you look at Taylor’s skin, each skin section has seven different values of her main skin tone, but for her red lips and for her sequined body suit, one color was not going to do this piece any justice. While her red lips were straight forward, her Body suit was a different story. In the original picture, the sequins hitting the light made it so there were multiple colors. I decided to take the main colors of the grey-ish suit with deep blue and magenta sequin highlights, and use those three colors to use for the body suit. It was a challenge to road map this out on my template as my printer colors didn’t fully match the colors I was seeing on the screen. So halfway through road mapping my color copy, I decided to start over and print in black and white, and color with a color pencil what color I wanted each shade to be. This was a pain staking process, and one that on somedays all I could muster for working on the body suit was 5 minutes tops before mental exhaustion would set in. With these two challenges to accomplish along with getting back into creating art, I found this piece to be successful in what I wanted to accomplish artistically.