Twenty six-year-old Neetu Sam from Warangal is a creative of whom the city should be proud. Humble to the core and hard-working — whether it was her work in engineering or in tutoring people for their IELTS and GMAT courses — she’s making happy rounds on Instagram as a photographer and a paper-cut artist.
Under the moniker @abrowngirlbasket, one simply has to peruse her feed and think ‘wow, this girl has serious patience to pull these creations off!’ But the enterprising young woman has gone beyond that and does orders of this artwork.
Edited excerpts from an interview:
Have you always been artistic?
Art has been a love for me ever since I was a kid. I was always into sketching, experimenting with colour palette and various forms of art like chalk-sculpting, Origami, crafts, as a hobby mostly.
Neetu Sam aka @abrowngirlbasket
Once I was done with my +2 I wanted to get into NID to pursue fashion designing, but my family wanted me to be a engineering graduate andI didn’t want to let them down. So I got my degree in Engineering and decided I would make a choice of career from now on. I prepared for CAT, got shortlisted into few IIMs and other top B-schools but again I had to take a step back because of various constrains then told myself whatever I choose to experiment with should not be a trouble to my parents at any point of time and as I needed finances to experiment on what I actually wanted to do, I started earning by home tutoring school kids and have been a freelance content writer for past 6 years now.
Eventually I got certified as a British Council certified trainer in English Language Training for adults, where I trained and assisted people from IELTS till GMAT courses. I worked for a few years and quit my job, now I am figuring out to give the best for what I always wanted to be, as I didn't want to have a regret that I never really tried with all my heart and soul.
What initially drew you to the paper cut art?
Even at work I was always sketching duringbreak times as a form of my stress busting. One day, while I was searching for some origami details I came across a paper-cut article on Facebook which blew me away. To see how a person can get so intricate just with a piece of paper, looked really challenging yet exciting to me. Since then, I started learning about all the details such as the tools needed and learnt about kinds of paper and got more into betterment in sketching.
It’s been three and a half years now I kept practicing daily. People at home and office also used to think me a crazy person as I hardly spent time talking to people while I was in this learning process.
What is the biggest challenge of doing paper cut art? Precision, finding the right paper, patience?
I learned this style as a cumulation of all these three challenges: if there isn't a right quality paper then all the effort is in vain as the paper won't hold on for such detailing. Also if there isn’t the right precision then the beauty of the final output is unclear.
Neetu Sam’s Tweety bird creation
Finally, if I am not patient enough then I lose focus around what to keep and what to remove while I am cutting the paper which messes up the entire thing.
So any one among this goes missing is leading to a disaster with the final finish.
What inspired you to do certain pieces like the Tweety bird?
Tweety was an experiment of me trying out ‘micro-form’ of paper-cut art so I went ahead with this good detailing of giving it a 2D look. I chose that with the angle of bird and detailing Tweety’s expression through those little hands just in two inches of paper-cut.
Neetu Sam with a collection of her works
As I mentioned earlier I love story-lines and I like the work to be minimalist.
Being a sunset lover, I had an idea to combine photography with paper-cut, clicking a picture of a paper-cut I did and placing it in front of my camera at sunset time which came up in-frame.
How did you turn paper cut art into a business?
Paper-cut art as a business was never really my idea to be honest. It just happened eventually with time as people started to like my work and placed orders through Instagram to have one for themselves and I felt responsible for the work I did more than just a hobby and wanted to take it a step ahead.
Once they get delivered they revert with a call in sheer joy just smiling and thanking for making it look beautiful, which is all I need when I share my work with the clients.
