About Our Oversprays


What is an overspray?
As you may know, the vast majority of our original hand cut papercuts receive at least one coat of acrylic spray paint to provide colour as well as an extra layer of protection. Once the original is delicately lifted from the mountboard on which it has rested, what you are left with is an overspray of the original. In many ways it’s akin to a negative image and in the vast majority of cases it’s as unique and unrepeatable as the original papercut.

In theory
That’s if all goes to plan however, which is far from guaranteed. Sometimes the overspray marks, smudges or simply doesn’t look very appealing. In those cases, there simply isn’t an overspray available. At other times an overspray might be so good that we’ll frame it and offer it as part of a matched pair, complete with the original papercut. Truly a complete one-off marriage of individual pieces.

We even have situations, thankfully rare, where we have more than one overspray of an original. Sometimes this is because the original was damaged in the spraying process, for example with ‘Uniquely Trinity’ where we have an overspray of an original that no longer exists! These incredibly delicate originals can very easily stick to their backgrounds and at times the process of freeing them can take an agonisingly long time, gently teasing each element away.

Other times this can be because we completed an original, again thankfully very rarely, and didn’t feel the original was 100% right. This could be because we weren’t happy with some elements of the cutting process or even that we felt the original was the wrong size. In these cases, for example with ‘Just the ticket’, we will sacrifice the original in question to make a number of oversprays, possibly in different colours. Typically we’ll get about 3 before the original ‘dies’.

We have priced our oversprays to reflect their uniqueness and unless stated, each one comes cellophane wrapped complete with a backboard ready for you to frame and hang however you like.