The Decoupage Gallery: A Collection of Over 450 Color and 550 Black-and-White Design Motifs

Aptly called "painting with scissors," decou-page is the art of decorating a surface with cut-out paper images, as beautifully documented in this overflowing archive of popular decoupage subjects. The book opens with a brief history of the craft and provides concise instructions for cutting out motifs, coloring black-and-white prints, preparing surfaces, gluing, varnishing, and sanding. Then a dazzling collection of more than a thousand prints provides animals, bows and ribbons, cherubs and cupids, flowers, fruits, and vegetables, shells and marine life, sporting images, and numerous borders and background patterns. The color pages are printed on one side so that all of the images can be used; because they can be photocopied easily, the black-and-white pages are printed on both sides.

Dee Davis has examples of her decoupage work in many public and private collections, including the Museum of the City of New York. She has taught at Pratt Institute and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, both located in her home city, New York. Gail B. Cooper is a former teacher, an avid collector of antique prints and decorative papers, and an accomplished decoupage artist who is also based in New York.