Shel Silverstein’s “Stairway”
Idea
When over the course of the month, if I don’t get an idea bestowed upon me from the idea gods, I look to some of my authors for inspiration. Here are some of them:
- Edward Lear and his nonsense poems.
- Shel Silverstein
- Lewis Carroll
- Aesop
- Mother Goose
This month, I decided on Shel Silverstein’s poem “Stairway”, from his book Everything On It.
Design
I decided to use an origami architecture (OA) design, which is a 90° design that uses a single piece of paper. As I worked on some sketches, I thought, this design seemed familiar. I looked back at my previous cards and discovered I had used a similar design from Chatani’s Pop-Up Greeting Cards book for the September 2019 card. In that case, the pattern was exactly from the book, but with some cats added.
September 2019 card
For this card, the core of the design is similar, with three sets of stairs, but that’s where the similarity ends. In an effort to give the idea that the stairs were going up very high, I made them smaller as they went up to get a forced perspective. The width of each set of stairs is different with the nearest being the widest, the lowest a bit smaller, and the highest the smallest.
Forced perspective
Ideally, I would have liked the back set of stairs to get narrower as it got higher, but all of them must be the same width for the pop-up to work. I did make the depth of the treads get smaller as they went up. Also, the railing gets smaller as it goes up.
I could have adapted the digital design from the September 2019 card, which the Silhouette Cameo cut out for me, but since this was going to be a very irregular shape, I decided to do it all by hand. After doing a couple smaller sketches, I drew the pattern on a piece of index (light cardstock) paper. This version has all the exact layout of the stairs so I knew that it would fold properly.
The exact layout
This is the same card, but I’ve drawn in all the illustrations, and taken liberties with all of the edges that will not be folded. On the top fold of the nearest stairs, I did make two of the treads hang over the front to mix things up a bit.
Updated layout, partially cut out
After cutting everything out by hand, I scored all the mountain folds and creased all of the valley folds, and did the painstaking task of folding the card while coaxing all the folds to go in the right direction. Since the creases create stress on the mechanism, especially on all the smallest stairs, I scored all of them on the back side to make all of the stairs open up nicely.
Like all OA pop-ups, this one is a bunch of rectangles built on top of one another. Here’s the side view showing the rectangles.
Side view
The illustration is very much in the style of Shel Silverstein. I thought of making a mouse climbing the stairs, but thought that wouldn’t fit the style. However, there is one hiding.
Did you find me?
How many times in this blog have I emphasized the importance of making sure the mechanism fits inside the card when closed? After attaching the cover and cutting the card to size, I found I nicked off the top of the railing! Compare the drawings above to the final version.
Cover
The cover is the title, the first four lines of the poem, and the sun.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The base and mechanism are made from 199gsm index paper, which is a light cardstock.
- Everything was cut by hand
- The illustrating was done with Pitt Artist Pens