Special Delivery
Idea
A common October theme is Halloween. Looking through the Opus, page I found these cards that had a Halloween theme:
| Date | Card |
|---|---|
| October 2024 | A flock of black birds |
| October 2023 | Haunted house |
| October 2017 | Tree stump with pumpkin and ghosts |
| October 2016 | Pumpkin & ghosts |
| October 2014 | Black cat latern |
| October 2013 | Hallmark Halloween centerpiece remake, mentioned here |
Searching for Halloween decorations, I thought it’d be fun to have a crate of decorations that broke open and had ghosts, bats, etc. flying out. My initial sketch had several different things, but when I started implementing the larger version, I found the ghosts filled the card nicely.
Sketch.
Design
The main part of the card would be a crate with ghosts that would rise up and the card was opened. The mechanims to do this is two V folds that make a vertical movement. Until I started writing this blog, I had forgotten that I used this mechanism in the May cards. They say memory is the first to go, and the second thing is… dang! I forgot.
Anyway, below are two photos of the mechanism as the card opens. It starts with the second V towards the front of the cards and as it opens it flattens out, raisin the ghosts attached to it.
The mechanism opening.
Since it’s hard to describe, here are two gifs showing the mechanism in action from the front and side views. In the side view you can see that the top V’s center fold stays vertical and the card is opened.
The mechanism in action.
The crate is a simple parallel fold over the Vs. The ghosts on the sides are attached with four small floating planes. Here’s one of them.
Floating plane.
The mice make a minor appearance on the cover and one snunk into the crate, too! You can also see a minor repair I had to make on the crate after my scoring got a bit too deep.
Ghost mouse.
The entire card was cut by hard this time. The brown mechanism is Michael’s cardstock, and the ghosts are lighter index paper. I used pens to draw the ghosts and then cut them out. The background is pastels.
Cover
The cover’s background is some decorative paper I had laying about with “Happy Halloween” printed on it. Although the ink didn’t print very well. The truck was drawn by hand, colored with colored pencils, and cut out by hand.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The base is Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb.
- The mechanism is on cardstock and index paper.