This card right here can be to anybody from anybody for any occasion at all, not specific to this occasion but it can be if you like, just say so on front if you want that, or leave it off so your card doubly sticks out among all the others for using Christmas time to express your affection that is felt everyday throughout the year.
You'll need a couple pages of card stock. One to make I-bars. Your artwork will be glued upon those to stand up like a table. I used photocopies of my own hands for a card, but they can be drawn, and drawn as cartoons, and drawn as poorly as you like, that is not the important part, or maybe drawn as octopus arms instead or maybe bear paws.
Glue on the blue part, scores on the dotted lines, cut on solid lines. This part is measured. The space between the dotted lines is the important part the rest is all tabs.
The I-bars are prepared all at once without regard to exact lengths. Estimate how much length of this will be needed for three per hand, A whole page of them is probably overdoing it. They are cut to length, determined by the size of the pictures of hands. Plus they do not have to be the full span of the hand, they can be only segments, and the tabs can be trimmed or extended, showing or hidden.
Three I-beams elevate each hand. You can see how they do not have to be the same height, but why complicate things at this point?
Crucially, an I-bar is glued directly above the center fold for each hand and that matches a fold made to the hand where a hand would fold. The placement of the I-beam on each side of the center fold is determined by the wrist and fingers of the paper hand. The paper hand is creased to comport with the central fold.
Everything else is pretty much fair game, art-wise, and mechanics-wise. The fingers and wrist must fit inside the edges the same distance as the height of the I-beams you made. They can be trimmed after the card is closed.
When applying the hands, match up the spines. The I-beam is elevating the central fold, duplicated in the hand. The creases made to each hand are important to this card. Score them first by finding their placement on the card, then glue the rest of the I-beams accordingly.
When glueing, everything can be tested by flopping completely to the left and completely to the right. Parallelism will keep everything perfect.
This is the hard part, thinking of something sincere. Something so real and so pure that it cannot fail to touch the person you love like POW right in the solar plexus. Avoid anything so arch as "May the Holidays bend the arc of moral universe toward a season of giving." Sit down and connect your head to your heart and ask yourself what you want to say to this person. This holiday season provides an opportunity to express concretely what you hope to express throughout the year this easily, here see, Honey, I think about you always, you are everything in the world to me, and I mean it.
Glue a real raisin and a real bean. If mailing, I suggest a picture of a raisin and a picture of a bean.
There. A Christmas card that speaks directly of your personal love.
4 comments:
If I started this now I would be done by Valentine's Day.
How much would it cost to purchase Chip Ahoy for a female friend I have? I think her face would light up like Paris when she unwrapped him, and I just know she would get hours of joy playing with him next to the tree. What's the battery life on that thing?
Dude, you are like the biggest nerd ever to have lived.
Very cool, Chip.
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