Study in black and white II
Idea
I was looking through Paul Johnson’s New Pop-Up Paper Projects book, and he had an “Angled Pop-ups” lesson that I couldn’t quite understand from just reading his directions and the small diagrams, so I tried it out. I played around with the design and came up with a variation, which had a unique top-to-bottom twisting motion. That was the mechanism I decided to use for this card.
Once again, I had a mechanism looking for a subject. How about making a series? Last month was black and white triangles, so I tried different black and white patterns before finalizing on squares (or diamonds if you prefer).
Design
The mechanism is cut from one piece of paper with four nested Vs folds, each one progressively smaller. The diagram below shows the pattern with solid lines as cuts and dotted lines as folds. The blue fold is forward, yellow back, green forward, and red back.
That will form the mechanism as shown below in the front view. The high-contrast pattern makes it a bit difficult to see, but I have annotated the photo with the same colors as above.
Here’s the top view showing the entire pattern all nicely lined up. This is a 90° card, but to get the full twist on the mechanism it must be opened a bit more than 90° due to the stiffness of the paper.
I used Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb for the main mechanism thinking I wanted a stiff card for the narrow outer V fold, but it was a bit too stiff. Even with cutting halfway through it was tricky to get it to fold nicely.
Cutting the mechanism from the base instead of gluing it on leaves a square hole under it. To cover that, I put the main card inside a piece of lighter cardstock, with squares printed in its center to complete the pattern.
While writing this blog and reviewing the photos, I see I forgot to fold up two smaller Vs on the top and bottom of the card, which I had in the prototype. But it’s 700 miles away now, so a fix will have to wait.
Cover
Like last month’s card, the cover is some of Howard the Younger’s pre-school artwork with a square added to it.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The pattern was printed on Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb, then cut by hand.
- Paper was used for the third square, which is on the back, as well as the red triangle.
- The outer layer is Michael’s 80lb cardstock.