Free form pop-up zine, part 2
Last month, I started this free form pop-up zine with the goal of making things more fun for myself for a little bit, and one idea I ran into was making these sort of weird b-sides to the Opossum and Magpie zine.
The second spread on that one was this spinning sunflower:
So I wanted to make a variation on this idea but with a couple of additional elements.
One thing I like to do in general is to keep all the components of a given spread to a single letter size piece of card stock (8.5 x 11 inches). Although the reality is that using the "Print then Cut" feature on the Cricut machine makes the actual usable area about 6.75 x 9.25 inches, since there is a black registration rectangle that has to be printed on the page:
This time I wanted to stay within these bounds, as the previous one had an additional component that had to be cut on a second sheet.
I started by prototyping a hand made version where the sunflower turned into an eye with a couple of elements that looked a bit like eyelashes:
Instead of a twisting circle I ended up with a sort of scallop. After this I designed the all the components in Cuttle, no tracing this time, I simply measured the handmade versions and drew them using basic shapes:
The nice thing about doing this over and over again is that I'm able to reuse some elements like the tabs and slots that help me easily attach all the parts together.
This the the assembled version without illustrations, I'm pretty fond of those leaf-like eyelashes.
I added some drawings on top using the sunflower color palette and ended up with this, lots of eyes!
Other projects and updates:
I made another kinetic piece for a Giant Robot show. The theme was "Deep Forest" so I made a wolf with some mushrooms. I've been exploring these wood carvings with simple movements and very little color. I'm not the best at it, but I enjoy carving wood by hand and creating these interesting textures:
Mushroom wolf is available for purchase here. I also made a 1.5 minute video of the fabrication process, as usual posted in multiple places: Instagram, TikTok and youTube.
Best wishes for the holidays!
Federico