Public domain mouse
Idea
I was working on some sketches for a February card, and nothing was working out very well. Then I thought about the news that Disney’s Steamboat Willie is now in the public domain (Time article). I watched the cartoon (Disney’s or a Hi-Res version with a deleted scene). The iconic scene most often shown is Mickey at the wheel of the steamboat. That would be complicated since much of the detail is at 90 degrees to each other. I thought the boat would be a good alternative, and started doing sketches of that. Usually, I avoid searching the internet for ideas, but did in this case. The one pop-up I did find was not of very good quality, which gave me a challenge to make good one.
When I started watching the cartoon to figure out what the boat would look like in 3D, I found it changes from one scene to another. There are many websites about the cartoon, and some talk about its inconsistencies. When watching the cartoon, you will see that one scene conflicts with another. For example
- There are stairs behind the wheel in the close-up view, but not in the long view, and would go down right into the smoke stack.
- On the side view you can see nothing on the front of the main cabin, but later, on the front view, there is an opening.
- The galley has a round window, but that is never seen in any outside views.
- The crane is white in some views and black in others.
- The stack of boxes on the back of the boat only appears in the first scene.
- The gunnel is very short in the long view, but much taller in the close-up view.
- The number of pots on the back of the main cabin changes depending on the scene.
So I took my best shot at something as close as possible to the cartoon.
Design
The mechanism for the boat is fairly simple, but the devil is in the details. Here’s my design for the boat before putting it on the computer.
Paper design
The hull of the boat is a floating platform very similar to the pool from last July. Using the fold on that platform, I added a box to create the cabin. Then on the fold on the roof of the cabin, I added another box to make the wheelhouse. Like the July pool, the hull is surrounded by a piece of card to make the hull of the boat.
The next photo shows the central piece of the boat in red that pushes up the deck, cabin, and wheelhouse. The main section in the middle goes through a slot in the deck to push up the roof of the cabin. The smaller square part goes through a slot in the cabin roof to push up the wheelhouse roof.
Middle piece
The deck has small tabs on the left and right to hold up the flag, and crane, in purple. Likewise on on the next level are tabs to hold up the smoke stacks. And the small tab on the wheelhouse roof holds up the whistles. You can see that all of the purple items are wider than the tabs to prevent them from sliding down as the card is closed.
I only did one very rough small sketch, then created the design on the computer to have everything cut out on the Silhouette Cameo. Using the machine made it easy to make changes as I worked through what ended up being three full-size sketches. The first was pretty good. In the second one, I “colored” (it’s in black & white) many of the pieces to see how they’d look, and some more fine-tuning of the mechanism. One more round of find-tunning and I was ready for the real thing. Although difficult to see in the photo, each sketch has red ink and notes indicating what needed to be tweaked for the next cut.
The first sketch has a background that folded out and you could pull to the left to give an impression of motion, but that wasn’t too practical, so I opted for a stage set background.
Sketches
When the card is fully open, the fore and aft of the hull didn’t sit flat on the card, so the bottom edge of the hull curves down 2mm on each end. With a narrow boat, it left large spaces in front and behind the boat. I filled the front with the title screen from the cartoon, and for the back, I added a panel that could be lifted up to provide the background for the boat. A pull tab could have done that, perhaps as the card opened, but I was running out of time, and it may not have worked well anyway.
To attach the boxes, I used tabs and slots to accurately place each piece and also avoided more folds, which would cause resistance. I had to build it from the top down, attaching the wheelhouse to the cabin, then the cabin to the deck. Then I could weave the middle piece through to the wheelhouse.
Tabs for attaching the boxes
In the above photo you can see the middle piece poking through the deck, and the fold for gluing to the base in pink. The pink gluing tab above it is for the front edge of the deck. The gluing tab on the right is for a support that sticks up through the deck for the cow. The green boxes show the two forward tabs of the main cabin.
I had lots of options for what to put on the stern of the boat. To make music, Mickey uses a goat, cow, parrot, cat, goose, and pig (deleted when aired on television). Since the mechanism is pretty small, I opted for the larger goat and cow. I tried to draw Pete, his nemesis, but it never looked right.
Animals and the crane
The boat is cardstock, and all of the items attached to it are paper. The next photo shows the boat assembled and the paper pieces cut out, inked, and ready for assembly. Notice there are fronts and backs for each piece, so you can get a 360° view of the boat. The two white pieces above the boat are the supports for the cow and goat.
Ready for assembly
The crane is paper with thread for the sagging rope and the hook. I used super glue on the thread to create the hook. You can also see I chose to go with three pots on the back wall, along with the washtub and washboard. Through the window, you can barely see the “Potato Bin” from the final scene.
For the background I tried to faithfully replicate the background from the cartoon, and instead of leaving the back of it blank, I made it look like stage flats, with some stagehands working back there.
Mice always want to lend a hand
Being an inked cartoon, all the lines are black, I also inked all my lines.
Inking lines
This is fine, but when I folded the mechanism, the white edges of the card showed. To fix that I carefully used a brush pen on all the edges to make them also black.
Before and after inking the edges
All in all, I think it turned out pretty well. The tiny details are a bit rough, but I think Ub would like it.
Which is which?
Cover
The cover has the mice wondering if they will be in the public domain. It has a printout from the cartoon and illustrated with pens and colored pencils. The text balloons were printed and cut out on the Silhouette Cameo.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The steamboat and background are made from 199gsm index paper, a light cardstock.
- Most of the other parts on the boat are made with printer paper.
- The boat and all paper parts were cut by the Silhouette Cameo, the background was cut by hand.
- The illustrating was done with Pitt Artist Pens and Prismacolor pencils.