M fold

This is tutorial #19 in Duncan Birmingham's series and I'm glad that I watched it. I did not know this, and it sure is going to be useful. I was delighted to see him do this so deftly because I was getting at the same thing by a different more tedious way and I didn't comprehend the idea behind it. It's applications are endless, for backgrounds and for subjects and for combinations with other mechanisms.

The whole series is fantastic. What a tremendous resource. And all of this is in his new book. I have his older book, A pop-up manual but those pictures are cute drawn illustrations and his new book that shows at the end of each video is much better. And better yet, the book is marked down for Amazon Prime members from $20.00 to $15.00 and that's a whole 25% off. A very reasonable price.

But I'm thinking about something else right now.

I'm doing something else, a card that relies on a different mechanism. I'm already nearly done with it and I'm down to making a crucial decision. 

A friend that I've known for well 2/3 of my life has died and left his survivors bereft. (Left them wealthy but still bereft.) They own my art and it's hanging in the central location of their splendid very large ranch home on a huge amount of land. He was a hunter. My customary ideas flooded first, floating lotus pond with butterflies, swarms of butterflies, you know, metamorphosis and all that, but then I thought of one of the pages I intended for depicting the wheat field cycle. The idea was for a flock of geese flying over a mature wheat field. That card idea still in incubation was for a few pages showing the cycle of growing wheat; planting, a green immature field, a gold mature field showing other life forms that take up in the field as it's growing, then lastly the harvest, a close up between two rows of cut wheat and death and destruction of uninvited life forms, a torn spider web, insect parts all over the place, a field mouse nest torn apart, bits of bloody rabbit limbs and the like, with a combine drawn blithely chugging away in the distance drawn on the background. 

I have the background drawn and the geese but I haven't decided yet how to arrange the geese. It needn't be a wheat field for this. The original idea was arrange the geese as military airplanes flying in formation across the card, but now I'm torn with the idea of arranging them properly as geese fly. Since the V spreads so much they must be arranged flying upward and not across. Since the wings do not touch then the the birds must be connected with clouds that partially block the background. They'll have to peek through sideways to appreciate the background hedgerows if they care to.