On the road to Bremen
Idea
When I was young I had a storybook about the Bremen Town Musicians. It told the story of four animals who, after being considered useless, were driven away by their owners. A donkey begins the tale, and it meets first a dog, a cat, and finally a rooster. They decide to go to Bremen to become musicians. On the way, they come across a house occupied by robbers. To scare the robbers away so they can get some food and shelter, they stand on each other’s backs and make “music”, which is so awful that it scares the robbers away.
Design
I had played around with some ideas for the musicians a few months before and shelved them. This month I revived them and decided to use a mechanism I’ve seen Robert Sabuda use, but I haven’t seen it in any of the how-to-books. Looking at my archives, I have used this mechanism before, exactly six years ago, in my September 2017 Pop-Up (before I started blogging) based on a Shel Silverstein poem “Alphabalance”. Here’s a picture of it:
The Z and E are pivots. When closed they and the letters above them are behind the man. As it opens they pivot upwards.
In this month’s card, the donkey’s back is the pivot point and the other animals rotate from behind the donkey to sit on its back. I was initially going to try making the other animals also pivot, but that got very complicated, so I decided to have the top three be one piece. Using different colors of card for each animal still gives a nice effect of stacking the animals.
Here’s a picture of the mechanism from behind:
The green pivot line is where the upper animals move up from behind the donkey to above it. Getting the distance between the green and blue lines was tricky. If too big, the dog would lean backwards. If too small, the vertical piece would bend sharply, and try to lift the donkey off the base. Doing some sketches helped me get the proper distance.
Notice that the donkey’s V points to the front of the card, but the others point to the back since they fold downward. Unlike in Alphabalance, I didn’t use a solid V behind the other one, instead, I used two vertical pieces to rotate the dog and others up as the donkey rises.
I was a bit worried about just using the donkey’s legs attached to the base, fearing that the thin legs wouldn’t be strong enough to lift the entire mechanism. Instead, I left the area under the donkey solid and used a piece of paper the same color as the base to make it look like just the legs were on the base. I’m not totally happy with the result, but the mechanism works fine. I decided to use only solid colors for the animals since I can only draw mice.
To finish off the base, I printed some text from the story on a couple of pieces of card, folded them, and pasted them on. The fold never wants to stay flat, so it gave a nice 3D effect.
How many times have I mentioned that you must always make sure that the mechanism will fit inside the card when closed? In this case, I had a nice sketch working but found the animals on the donkey’s back could be bigger. That would make it even taller, which is the main point of this mechanism. So I made everything about 20% bigger, but I forgot to check the donkey. Its nose and ears stuck out a bit. And of course, this was after I cut out everything by hand. By adjusting the angle on the base and giving the donkey a nose job, I was able to get it to fit.
Cover
The cover is a Google map from the arbitrarily picked city of Ovelgönne to Bremen, Germany. I updated the walking figures in the boxes to be donkeys.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The base was Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb
- Everything was cut by hand
- The other pieces are mostly cardstock from Michaels.