The Claw!
Idea
At one point, Grandma Teeny Wardinkle was WalMart’s oldest employee being in her 90s at the time. She always was a fount of interesting stories and I have a vague recollection about her talking about the claw machine game at Walmart. I have two memories, one of her chatting up the guy who packed in the toys so tight they were hard to get out, and a second of a man who would come in and win all the toys, then give them away. Whichever one, or both, is accurate, it inspired this month’s pop-up about a frustrated mouse playing the claw machine.
I thought it’d be fun to have a real crane rip the claw machine out of the building as a sort of “just desserts” for it.
Design
For the crane, I knew I wanted a large, thin V for the boom that would stick out high about the top of the card. For the cab area, I figured I could use some form of floating plane or parallelogram. As I played around, I remembered I had a copy of Big Dig by Paul Stickland, which had a crane pop-up in it. After looking at it, my brain was polluted with his mechanism, so I have to give him some credit. Although, I think I would have come up with something similar on my own – and he had not one mouse in the entire book.
The cab part of the crane is a parallelogram attached to the left side of the boom. Under it is a part that is parallel to the left angle of the crane that keeps it level. As the boom lifts up, it pulls up the cab parallel to that angle, which makes it move upward to stick out of the top of the card. I like mechanisms that move beyond the edge of the card.
The building is a floating plane powered by the main fold. Initially, I was going to have it open and lie flat, but by floating, I could have the front and back be nearly vertical. With the vertical ends, it looks more like a building and I can put mice on each end.
Front of Walmart
Of course, the smokers are out back.
Back of Walmart
I cut a hole in the top of the building for the exit of the claw machine. To give a bit of depth, I attached pieces of the broken root around the opening. The machine itself is attached to the roof with a piece of rice paper, which keeps it in place. The cable for the crane is elastic thread, which makes it pull nice and straight with slight tension when the card is fully opened.
The empty areas on the left and right sides were a bit of a problem, which I don’t think I solved really well. For the left side, I added some vague piles of dirt. I tried adding pallets of building materials, but it looked odd. Especially with the dramatic change in scale from the crane to the building. For the right side, I thought about adding cars in a parking lot (noting that Teeny’s always parked hers the farthest away so she could run in). Again, I couldn’t get anything to work.
The final touch was adding a moving arm to the top of the building to move a mouse to the left as it opened. Since I used a floating plane, it only moves 45°, and it’s under the boom as the card opens, so it’s not very noticeable. (If I used a flat building, it would have moved 90°.) Here’s the mechanism under the corner that will move the mouse at the building rises.
Moving arm
There’s lots of colored pencil work on this card. It was fun doing the crane, making it look used, with touches of rust on it. The building has an array of skylights on top. I added a bit of shadow on two sides of each one to give them some depth and hopefully make it more obvious they are skylights.
Cover
The cover has printed speech bubbles and colored pencils with inked outlines. For the toys, I used pastel colors, trying to give the effect that they are behind the glass of the machine. The photo doesn’t show it well.
The title of this blog is a reference to a scene in the movie Toy Story where toy aliens in a claw machine worship “the claw.”
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The base is Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb with pastels as the background.
- The mechanism is on index paper, and illustrated with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens and PrismaColor colored pencils.