Under a bridge is fine.
Idea
Mom Wardinkle has been an “unexpected” landlord for a few years now and has been ready to relinquish the title for some time now. Finally, the last house has been sold, and she is no longer a landlord! That’s the idea for this month’s card: a celebration of the unburdening of the yoke. The wordplay of homeless and houseless came to mind. Homelessness is a serious issue, and I don’t intend to poke fun or make light of it.
I wanted to have someone burning the accouterments of being a landlord and could really only think of ‘For Rent’ signs. There are many activities associated with the job, but not many ‘things.’ And since I can draw mice, they answered the call, again.
Design
For the fire, I tried using a pyramid shape initially. A couple of prototypes proved that it just always looked too much like a pyramid. Using an open-top shape of a couple of rings made a nice fire pit. The small sketch version looked fine with two rings, but the full-size card needed three.
For the celebrant to be only on one side, I had to span the main fold to raise it as the card opened, so used a pile of signs to reach across the divide. To add a bit of interest, I added a sign on the right with a slot. It didn’t want to lay flat, so I added some extra cardstock under it to give it more weight.
From the sketch, I found a tricky issue when the card folded. It was going to be tight getting the dancer to fold forward and the fire to move up without hitting each other. You may notice that the back left quarter of the fire is a bit shorter than the rest to help that.
Gluing three rings that nest into each other can be difficult if you completely attach one first. Instead, I marked where the first attached and glued only the left side. Then when cutting the tabs for the two outer rings, I made them the same size as the gap between the rings. This way, I simply glued all three left sides, one under another as shown below. Also note that, as usual, the mechanism goes right up to the bottom edge when closed.
After that glue set, I glued all three of the right tabs, closed the card, and crossed my fingers. Voila, three rings!
Usually, I like to put some background color down, but since this has printed text, adding pastels or pencil over the text just fades it. In this case, all the signs did a nice job filling the space.
For the pieces of sign that have been burned, I cut them irregularly and used black pastels for the soot. Then I crumpled up the sign to give it an even more damaged appearance.
The illustrations are done with pens and colored pencils. The text was printed on the base of the card, and all of the signs were printed out. Everything was cut by hand this time, no robot assist.
Cover
Like the inside, the cover text was printed then I used pens and colored pencils for the illustration.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The base is made of Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb
- PrismaColor colored pencils and and Pitt Artist Pens for illustrations.
- The mechanisms are made from 199gsm index paper, which is a light cardstock.