For this week’s Sunday Visit, we catch up with Pacific Northwest writer, artist, and educator Anna Brones. Anna works as a papercut artist, hand cutting illustrations from single pieces of paper. Her papercuts have taken many forms and her illustrations have been featured in books like Extra Helping and The Joy of Cooking, and in 2020, her Women’s Wisdom Project, a collection of 100 different papercut portraits of modern and historic women, was displayed at Vashon Center for the Arts. In 2022, in collaboration with her husband Luc Revel, she completed a permanent public art installation for the Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial. She also produces Creative Fuel, a newsletter and podcast, and is the founder of Creative Fuel Collective, a platform devoted to creativity that offers virtual workshops and creative community. You’ll see her prolific amount of artwork on her Instagram page, her website and if you’re lucky, in real life at one of her super exciting workshops.
We’re not sure she does enough.
Anna is a longtime friend of Botanical Colors and though we’ve collaborated with her before to design our gift cards, this year we pulled her in to do a lot more. All of our kits coming out are all covered in her papercut illustrations. You’ll see her art on the new Harvest Box (Preorder launches today!): Flowers and Foliage from Our U.S. Farmers, Dyes of the Américas Sampler Kit, on a special Persicara tinctoria postcard in our Easy 1-2-3 Fructose Indigo Kit and 3 other kits we’re launching this month!
We want you to love her as much as we do, so for this Sunday Visit, let’s jump in getting to know Anna.
Tell me about your first memory creating something and why it made an impact.
My mom is an artist, and my parents designed and built the house I grew up in, so creativity was always a constant. Lots of art supplies, scraps of wood to build tree houses with, that kind of thing. So it’s actually hard to pinpoint an exact memory, because it was all so integrated into everyday life. I do however have a memory of writing a poem about irises, maybe when I was around 8 or 9. I think I remember it because I memorized it. Do you want to read it? Of course you do.
Irises irises
We like you so much
Especially when you throw out
Your fragrance at us
When you first started out on your creative journey, did you think you’d be where you are right now?
Absolutely not! But that’s what I love about a creative path. I remember in my early 20s I was always really intrigued to meet people who worked at jobs I never knew existed. It was a reminder that the framework of “study [X] and then do [X] job” really doesn’t fit very many people, whether they are in a creative profession or not.
We’re super fans of your paper cut illustrations (obviously), can you tell me how you stumbled into this niche?
Thank you! Over a decade ago, I started collecting bike tubes to earrings out of. Whenever I got a flat, I would wash the tube and then have it on hand as a creative material. At some point, I needed to make a birthday card for someone and the cutting supplies were already on the table so I decided to use them to cut a card. Then I just kept going. Here’s one of the first pieces that I have a picture of on my phone, from 2014. I can’t even believe I am sharing this with you, but it’s good proof that our creative work always evolves!
What was your process for creating the papercuts we’re using on some of our new kits?
Earlier this year I was working on a series of silhouettes of flora and fauna I saw around me. Very Pacific Northwest forest energy, banana slugs and trilliums and such (which ended up turning into this). I was just fascinated with how you could capture the energy of a living thing simply through its shape and form. No color, no detail, just the silhouette. So I’ve kept doing that! I thought that this would work well for all of the dye plants that we were working with because the result is quite graphic.
For each dye plant, I would look at LOTS of reference images first, and then draw it numerous times. Kind of to get the feel of the plant in my hand. Then I do a final drawing on the black paper that I use to cut. Here’s the thing about silhouettes: I have to be in a headspace where I can be really loose and free while cutting. If I overthink the process at any point in time, the end result feels too “tight.” Which means that there were quite a few that I had to cut several times. I think that this is the ultimate reminder that whatever medium we’re working in, we have to trust all the work that we have done to get us to that point and that our creative muscles know what to do.
I’ve watched you evolve from being a journalist to a book author, a full-time artist to an educator, do you feel like each part of your story enhances the other? How?
I feel like everything I do is very interconnected. In my mind it’s all very much woven together, which maybe isn’t always apparent from the outside, but it’s the thing that allows me to do a multitude of things. Writing informs my visual art, my visual art informs my teaching, etc. At this point it’s actually really hard for me to tease them apart, and I don’t think I would be happy if I was only doing one of them. As humans, we’re all multifaceted, but I think that our traditional model of profession and work makes us feel like we need to fit into one singular box. That’s what’s nice about being a self-employed creative: you get to break down the box.
What is your favorite color right now and why?
I notoriously have a pretty monochrome palette that I use, even though I love all kinds of color. But in general I would say the Anna Brones palette is black, Payne’s gray, indigo, and a pop of golden yellow. It’s basically a moody Pacific Northwest horizon line where the sun is peaking through. I just got a new shade of black watercolor from Case for Making that’s called Squid Ink. And I always love using Biohue’s Organic Indigo ink.
Want to see Anna’s work up close?
Shop our kits
Shop all Biohue inks (on sale)
Shop Beam Paints (buy any Beam Paint and receive two Beam Paint sample cards with purchase!)