Paper Moths

I had been thinking, a while back, about combining letterpress printing and die-cutting to create some paper moth specimens. Something like the ones I made from leftover proofs of my book moths intaglio prints (sorry, no photos of those to hand at the moment), but more three-dimensional. I'm still planning to do that, but it occurred to me the other day that I could also make three dimensional moth specimens out of my handmade paper.

So I tried it. If you follow me on Twitter or Instagram (@anagramforink on both), or are a friend on my personal Facebook account, you may have seen a photo of the first attempt. For the past couple of days, I've been making a cheap dollar store shadow box look nice to put it in, staining, adding a hanging wire, and lining it. I still have to find a small brass latch, but today I've been trying to decide what colour paper to line the box with.

I've narrowed it down to five more-or-less neutral papers. Royal blue looked nice, as did burgundy, but the rich colours, I thought, drew too much attention to themselves. Here are the five finalists (apologies for the less than stellar photos -- I took these with my iPad in poor lighting). Any opinions are welcome.

White:

Black:

Grey faux parchment:

Deep grey:

Deep brown:

Some of the papers aren't lying flat, but they will once they're pasted in, so please ignore that. I won't mention which one(s) I'm most inclined towards yet, as if like to see what people think.

And I will be making more of these, and they will be for sale. This is, I hope, just the beginning. Which means I'm going to need to make more paper...