Don’t wake the giant.
Idea
February is cold in the midwest, and usually we have snow. I toyed around with some various ideas of snowmen, and other snowy themes, and ended up with a snowball fight. Even after that, the idea took a few twists and turns before ending up with a mechanical snowball thrower to dominate the battlefield. Originally an evil mouse was the driver and then when it turned into a yellow Cat machine, of course it had to be a cat driving it. Finally, a ninja mouse is about to defeat the evil cat, just like Luke did to the AT-AT in “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.”
This was to be the January card, but with graduation and the holidays, it got pushed out to February. For January, I fell back to using a pattern from a book, which is the “Decoration” pattern from Pop-Up Origamic Architecture.
Design
The mice out front are easy. The nearer ones are an acute-angle V (FS2) with the base at 85° to tilt it slightly back. The farther one with the mouse dodging out of the way is an asymmetric V fold (FS5), so the flying snowball and the other side can be at different angles. You’ll note that the folds in the center of the two are different.
The machine is a V fold with another V fold on top of it (BT3). Adding the machine to the second fold proved to be harder than I thought. The strength of the second fold is pretty weak and adding anything to it prevents it from opening as wide as it would otherwise. Usually, I do one or two sketches of a mechanism before doing the final, but this one had a few more. Six small, and two large ones in this case.
To make it as strong as possible, the main V that is attached to the base is made of heavier Bristol paper with scored creases, which is a bit of a risk since it tends to split apart if you’re not exactly on the crease. This one worked perfectly, but here’s an example where the score and crease didn’t align.
To make the mechanism on the second V as weak as possible, it is just 20lb paper and I used slots (BT6) to pull up the exhaust pipe in the front, and the cockpit in the rear. Slots are ways of creating a hinge without adding resistance to the mechanism. Even though the original second V was more than 90°, you can see that the nose doesn’t open to a square.
In the next photo you can get a better view of the tabs that stick out through the slots. As the card is opened and the second V spreads open the mechanism, the tabs pull the exhaust and cockpit into place without a glued joint on either side. It does mean you have the tabs sticking out, but I think it worked in this design.
We learn most from our mistakes, and I learned quite a bit about Vs on Vs making this card. Even so, it was a fun card to make and I do so enjoy working with the mice. They’re patient and fun to work with.
Cover
This is the first cover to have two frames. The background is a mix of pastels and colored pencils. The mice were drawn on separate paper, colored with pencils, and cut out by hand. The speech balloons were cut using the Silhouette Cameo’s Print & Cut feature. You can see from the cover and below that it does a pretty good job of cutting right where it should.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- Everything else was cut by hand, except for the speech balloons on the cover, which were cut by the Silhouette Cameo. .
- The base is Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb, with PrismaColor colored pencils for illustrations.