Study in black and white V
Idea
While looking for ideas for the June card, I browsed through some of Robert Sabuda’s and Mathew Reinhart’s amazing pop-up books. In Reinhart’s Star Wars: A Pop-Up Guide to the Galaxy I found an interesting mechanism in one of the little side pop-ups that used a flat pyramid shape to create some interesting movement.
I still didn’t have an idea for the content, but after doing some sketches with the mechanism I thought this could be another in the `Study in black and white’ series. Here are the others:
- Study in black and white I
- Study in black and white II
- Study in black and white III
- Study in black and white IV?
Design
Another month where I had the mechanism before the idea. Below are most of the sketches I did with this mechanism.
The initial octagon sketch worked pretty well but did hang up a bit when it was opened. I made a full-size sketch on cardstock to make sure the alignment would work well and used slightly smaller octagons, which fixed the issue on opening. It also created a border for the pattern, which really worked out, splitting the pattern on the sides right down the middle.
I really liked the movement created when opening the card, but after it was completely open, there wasn’t much ‘up’ to the pop-up. To give it a bit of height, I added another octagon in the center that floats above the four. This is attached to the lower two octagons, and as they rotate into position, its plane stands up all four of the base octagons. Since it is centered, but only attached to the lower octagons, half of it cantilevers over the top two octagons as they rotate into place.
I designed and printed the patterns using the Silhouette Cameo. Since octagons are all straight lines, I cut them out by hand. The actual mechanism under the octagons, and the supports for the floating plane were cut by the machine.
Cover
Like the other cards in this series, the cover is some of Howard the Younger’s preschool artwork with an octagon added to it. I had exhausted the artwork that matched the others and used some of his other works.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The base pattern was printed on Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb
- The upper two layers were printed on Michael’s cardstock.
- Paper was used for the red triangle.