When rocking horses dream.
Idea
After hurricane Helene, my quite pregnant niece and her two-year-old son took refuge with us for a week since they were without power. While here, her son played with some of Howard the younger’s and my toys. One of mine is a rocking horse, which was built by my grandfather a few years ago (I will not divulge how many). He played with that quite a bit, and looking at it, I thought it would make a good pop-up.
The real rocking horse
Design
Since the real rocking horse is made up of planes at 90°, converting it into a pop-up was straightforward. I did two sketches for it. One was a 180° card with the horse in the middle, a second, 90° card with the horse against the vertical part. The former left lots of room on either side that I didn’t know how to fill. The latter had less open space so I went with that.
Sketches
I couldn’t do the back of the seat with the 90° model, but that wasn’t a big negative. What to do with the blank areas was my next problem. I looked through books and searched the internet for poems about horses, but couldn’t find any ones that worked for me. I eventually settled on a Mother Goose poem and (poorly) adapted it for my rocking horse. While iterating over it, I got the idea of rocking horse dreams, and the penny dropped. The cover would be the first stanza and the horse’s head. The interior would have the second stanza, the horse, and in the background would be the horse riding on top of a mountain. Googling images, I settled on the mitten buttes in Arizona.
A rocking horse dream
The background was drawn using ink pens, and chalk pastels. Then it gets largely covered up by the rear part of the rocking horse. The poem was printed on cardstock and cut out by hand. In hindsight, the poem could have been a bit larges, and the horse a bit smaller.
The mechanism itself is pretty simple with one vertical plane and three horizontal ones that were part of the real rocking horse. I used photos to create a templates and had the Silhouette Cameo cut them out. The entire horse is red cardstock. The white is printer paper applied over the red. The black was added by hand with a brush ink pens. The brown and pink are colored pencil. The three horizontal pieces are black cardstock.
Below you can see the parallelograms that make up the mechanism. You can also see the second stanza of the poem tipping up a bit. I’ve done this on other cards by putting a fold on the leading edge of the text and the cardstock doesn’t lay completely flat, so it gives it a bit of dimension.
The parallelograms
How many times have I harped on making sure that the mechanism fits inside the folded card? For this one, I measured the real rocking horse to duplicate its proportions for the pop-up. After gluing the rear piece on, and then positioning the front one I found it stuck out of the card! For those who know the original, the pop-up horse is a bit thinner.
Cover
The cover has the red and white paper cut by the Silhouette Cameo to form the horse, which was decorated with colored pencils. Like the interior’s background, the cover’s background is pastel.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The base is Strathmore 300 Bristol 270gsm.
- The mechanism is Michael’s cardstock with attached printer paper.