Trannysaurus Rex
pop-up card
The card is intended for the birthday of a friend.
There is no birthday message, nor greeting of any sort. The card is simply a wordless expression of fondness that coincides with the recipient's birthday.Would't do, by words, to remind a friend of their own mortal extinction by drawing attention to their accumulating years, now would it? (I find the Spanish expression for happy birthday, feliz cumpleaņos, happy fulfilled years, which by my lights is the cognitive "compiled years" just a bit ironic.)
I included a band of white card stock that wraps the closed card with the question written between two green stripes, "Who was the most fierce of the Late Cretaceous?" So there are words after all, just not any birthday words, or anything along the line of "So, how does it feel to be so old and yet still alive?" Always so amusing, as if the person remarking weren't themselves on the exact same timeline moving at precisely the same pace and as if in the end relative youth were any sort of advantage. It's not.
At last I decided to spell it out, in case the card is insufficiently overt. Mustn't risk having a tacit pun go wasted, not one that is the point of the whole thing. So the letters for TRANNYSAURUS REX are cut out and pasted. I'm getting quite good at that, cutting out letters, you'd think it'd be tedious, and it is sort of, but not nearly so tedious as drawing leaves.
The pop up is a table set atop a central V mechanism that lifts upward and tilts forward toward the viewer. The two front legs of the table are shorter than the back legs. The front legs were added separately to tilt the table, which is the reptile's body, instead of simply gluing the table on doubled parallel identical V mechanisms placed along the central fold, as usual. This arrangement enabled one of the table legs to be disguised by one of the dinosaur's hind legs. Had T-rex's front legs not been so unusually undersized they could have been used to disguise the table legs too, but as it is, they are even more funny uselessly extended but for holding a purse. The remaining front leg of the table is disguised by plants. An additional folding mechanism tilts the neck and head of the dinosaur at a new angle to the body.
The tail and the upper hind leg of the dinosaur on top of the table are attached to each other and they are both attached to a short arm underneath them which in turn is attached to a crimp mechanism glued to the underside of the table. The crimp opens as the table is lifted, which forces an arc movement in the arm which then rotates the tail and leg. The tail and leg move a little less than 90° because the table, which is set an angle toward the viewer, does not lift completely. If it were constructed at 90°, then the arc movement of the arm would also be a full 90°. That's the best that can be done with these crimp mechanisms. [The original mechanism involved attaching the tail to the card backing (the ground) and to the body of the dinosaur with the leg glued on top of the tail so they both moved in unison. That worked in the two prototypes but failed with the card due to the thicker Bristol paper and because of the holes that are required. I didn't much care for that anyway and it wasn't that good to begin with. However, that left holes in the dinosaur body and in the card backing which then had to be covered or the whole thing completely redone. At that point I was unwilling to draw again all the leaves on the trees.]
The background of trees is also two V mechanisms arranged in and working in the same direction as for the dinosaur mechanism, but these are taller and larger and closer together. Cutout areas in the front surface uplifted by the background Vs allow a forest to be described dimensionally. The two main surfaces are drawn front and back.
It all folds back and tucks very nicely when closed. The only difficulty is the purse which dangles freely. The card must be tilted backward for the purse to collapse properly when closing otherwise because it's not connected the purse is smashed and creased wrongly, which I don't care about. As long as it dangles properly the first time the card is opened it's fine with me.
The prototypes attached additional surfaces to the background surfaces of trees but these were mostly omitted for the final card.
The cover is a simple line drawing of a fern, the same fern that is used repeatedly on the inside surface of the card. It is set on matt board with a window cut into it. I made a mistake by cutting at the wrong angle for the window (cutting on the back side of the matt board). After I cut a new window from a fresh piece of matt, I realized I could fix the first one by cutting at the correct angle and have a double window. So this matted sketch has a double window. Classy, eh?
The envelope is made of card stock to fit. It's sealed with a tab drawing of the same fern on the cover. By using the same band with green stripes the year "2010" is pasted next to the fern seal.
I would photograph and upload the three prototypes, but nobody ever bothers to look at those pages, so I won't be arsed.
Comments? Remarks, spelling/grammar corrections, japes or jabs?
Contact:
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