Never Ending Art Cards

I stumbled across a video on never ending cards a few days ago and immediately was struck with the idea that I could make them at least five times as cool and ten times the amount of effort by arting them up. 

I posted a quick flip through of my prototype on instagram and it gathered the interest of more than three people in the group I usually swap in, so I made a fairly straight forward video tutorial for group purposes. The video covers the basic assembly method and a few basic tips I figured out early on. 

If you loathe video tutorials, here's the template I was working from. Save yourself some heartache and ignore the "d" and "c" markings in the top diagram, they are only there to mislead you and make you cry. I wish I had a source for this template besides "google image search and squinting" but no dice. If you don't get the folds working on the first try, do not give up. So far the consensus has been that everyone took two or three tries. 

I started to work on my second one with no real theme to it. I basically just treated each set of pages like it was its own stand alone handmade postcard and went crazy, here's the pages in my new one with what worked well and what was a struggle. 

Page one, pretty simple. The background was done with my beloved Faber-Castel Gelato sticks and stamped over. The gelatos cover the base color of the paper nicely (I used a burnt orange piece of printer paper) but they smear and smudge something awful between pages. I ran into some trouble with the thickness on the folds and had to go back through and score along the vertical crease with an x-acto knife (in addition to cutting it horizontally). 

As for the lettering, well, I wanted to do "Enlightenment is Overrated" but I got bored halfway through letter hunting. Most the letters were clipped from the same envelope the lily came off of, I have never re-purposed an envelope this fast.

Page two. This traumatized little beardie. The background is stamped repeatedly over the "natural" color of the paper. The beardie itself was cut into 4 pieces on my sliding cutter along not only the seam but also the creases. This made it so much easier to fold the card later and I didn't have to fret about accidentally scoring through the base paper. 

I finished it up with some washi and an inner monologue. The washi is thin enough it didn't need to be scored at all along the creases. I wish I had done the entire background in washi before adding the lizard. Looking at it now, I am still not sure I'm happy with it. 

Page three I consider to be the most effective, both in looks and ease of assembly and folding. It's a cubomania style spread. I clipped the image from a book of Clive Barker's illustrations, cut it into 3/4th inch squares and randomly reassembled it. The orangey yellow smudging was initially an accident from the gelatos I used on page four (they really do get everywhere) but it pulls it together nicely. 

I'm definitely going to make another done entirely in this technique. Due to its random nature it looks good both the way it was assembled and the way it rearranges itself when you fold it back to reveal the next page. It would be phenomenal with simple patterns worked in. 

Finally, page four. Gelato background that I masked off with strips of thin washi tape and spread black acrylic over with a palette knife, plus a good ending quote. 

Let us take a moment of silence for the sharpie I ruined trying to black out the gelato. Ashes to ashes and all that.  

I like how the acrylic looks here, but it definitely warped the paper a bit. I put the card under a few heavy books to flatten for the time being. If you are doing acrylic on yours, I highly suggest doing it first thing to save yourself some tense moments. While the paint didn't bleed through my paper at all, my haphazard application of it got into the center seam and nearly ruined one of my other spreads. If I hadn't noticed it soon enough to wipe it out, it definitely would have adhered things together in bad ways. 

Overall, washi tape, cubomania, stamping and dry media are your friends for this project, especially if you are using printer paper. You also should not underestimate your creasing tool here. Even if you need to steal a butter knife for the blunt end, you need a creasing tool. And a scoring tool. And glue. And a little patience.

I will continue to fiddle around with this nonsense because it is screaming for some little ink drawings or to be assembled with canvas paper and adorned with acrylic that way. I'm also thinking decorating just the front page and using the other pages to write on will make for some excellent pen pal letters. Except if I received one in the mail a week ago I would have been dumbfounded on how to get into it... 

What I am really curious about is how these would hold up sent naked through the post. They would need a sticker or label or something to hold them shut in transit and would certainly require letter rate rather than postcard. I'm sensing yet another prototype and a test mail in the near future. 

If you're giving it a go, good luck and have fun!