Monday, February 2, 2015

Amenemheb's garden

On the walls of Army Commander Amenemheb's  tomb a scene is painted of a garden with an artificial lake surround by orchards. The painting is somewhat stilted, more of a map of an idea, the mathematic precision unnatural. The actual orchards probably more of a mess.



Joe's house in Phoenix has a small orchard and Joe says it is a major pain in the butt. Too bad, the oranges are fantastic.

This setup gave me an idea for a pop-up with a rectangular pond surrounded by trees on two levels.


Elevated so the pond can have depth. 


I want an crocodile in there that hides when the card is opened. You can only see it as the card is opening and as the card is closing. The trees merely flip up, rather, in the revised version, instead of the trees as content glued on the top layer that flip up, the trees are attached to the bottom layer positioned through a slots made in the top layer and glued standing straight up in the opened position, so, as hinges the trees are forced by the slots to all fold outward in unison and lay flatly when the card is closed, as you shall see.


It all starts with a little hill so the crocodile's head will poke up when the card is closed and lay flat when the card is opened.





Paper I-bars to elevate the second layer as a table. All the I-bars will run parallel with the central fold and perform as hinges. "V" bars are to add content to the top surface when a length of it is snipped in the center and bent into another V shape, one half glued to the surface the other half sticking up available to have trees glued to it. This turned out too messy and the idea abandoned.



 

For waves that close shut over the crocodile when the card is opened. 


The trees will be glued to the upright "V" mechanisms arranged in chevron. 


Alternately, with slots in the top layer and trees glued to the bottom instead, the trees will all be flat and parallel with the central fold. That's fine for the trees on the sides but less fine for the trees on the top and on the bottom of the pond. Their trunks will be flat and parallel with the central fold too unless I design another attachment that flips the tree branches 90°. 


At this point it is too big a mess. It must be the slot method. Even if the trees on the top and the bottom face the wrong way like good little soldiers. 

With tree trunks through slots, all the tree trunks will open flat and parallel with the central fold. I do not want that for half of the trees, top and bottom. Perhaps there is something they can do differently from the other trees that puts the plane of their flatness at 90° to their trunks. Maybe the whole row at once. Maybe the whole orchard at once. 

This shows what an unsightly mess it's become and the trees are not even glued on yet.


This shows it can shut.


So, it's all there and ready to go and I completely lost interest. I do not care about Amenemheb's garden anymore.

The trees must be shortened the closer you get to the edges, left and right, or else they will stick out of the card when it is closed. I just now noticed the servant figures in margins tending the orchards and that design element really does help a lot. The figures are on a larger scale than the trees, each figure is three trees tall, and that helps greatly should I ever pick this up again.

I just lost interest immediately after that last transfusion, as if my new blood just flat isn't interested in any of this. And I have to respect that. 

And I wonder sometimes how did I manage through all that to maintain any semblance of self whatsoever, and I still do not know. At the same time I am still thinking about what could make good pop-ups with no impulse to execute the ideas. None whatsoever.  But if I did execute it then I might do twenty-five  or so all at once, send them all out Fed Ex en mass each with a note, "This is all you're having this year." The same thing as everyone else. Just to get cards out of my system. 

Heck. I made three of the same idea at once before and sent them out dispersed to three women important to me and nobody complained about not being unique.

6 comments:

chickelit said...

Is this how you spent Superbowl Sunday, Chip?

Unknown said...

If so, wise move.

ricpic said...

A pool surrounded by orchards - a water garden - was probably the Egyptian idea of paradise. Mine too.

Chip Ahoy said...

Yes, actually.

And at one moment I noticed hockey was on the teevee and I thought, "Isn't there a Superbowl game today? Go shopping! But I could not be moved so I thought, "Maybe you had just check out the football game." So I started at channel 2 and clicked through until I found it, BOOM, touchdown right at that moment, and a dramatic one too, not a regular touchdown, a made for teevee touchdown, like sliding in right at the camera and I thought, "holy shit, that is good. Is that a highlight or what?" No. It happened right then, like the fickle finger of fate guided my impulses to provide a splendid shot of a touchdown. We spiritual types like to acknowledge these little lagniappes as they arise here and there like moist pungent mushrooms of life.

Chip Ahoy said...

But now I am reading on twitter and on other sites, conversations with names, quips, jabs, japes and jokes and pictorial cartoons that I do not understand. I Google the names and it turns out to be a coach and I still do not understand. It is the very familiar frustration of penetrating the adages and the axioms of another language, a task that takes forever and seemingly is never mastered. Or, the same thing as being a child stuck in a room full of adults speaking the same language together but in a completely different way, laughing together at things devoid of anything funny. "Then Johnny ran around the room with this fork stuck in the back of his hand." *laughter* That sort of thing. I do not know know what is going on.

The Patriots out of Boston beat the Seahawks out Seattle, right?

And the Seahawks are the team that beat Denver Broncos, right?

Broncos are NFL, right?

So then, Seahawks are AFL , no?

I am not certain of any of this.

Nonetheless I concluded when it gets down to it, AFL is a more dangerous league than NFL, and this is shown repeatedly with outlying cases. Right?

I don't know.

For these reasons I expected the Seahawks to win because of the butthurt they applied to the Broncos, and because of previous similar incidents, I was placing the Patriots in the less dangerous league.

But I honestly do not know anything about all this.

Chip Ahoy said...

ricpic, maybe it can be a page in a series of pages that amounts to a little adventure story. It could be a peaceful break.

I either stopped at the point of solving the problem of the trees all facing the pool or I stopped at the point of transfusion. I do not recall.

But as I look through the pictures a couple of solutions become apparent.

The side trees open into place as hinges guided by slots made in the upper level.

the top and bottom trees trunks can flip into position the same way, but not with their tops attached. Their tops flip into place a different way and they meet, all the tree trunks at once meet with all of the tops when the card is fully opened.

l can do something with straps that displace the central fold in that area and double it. Allowing V mechanisms containing flip-up trees on both sides of the central fold. The Vs are attached at the new spines right where the band is glued to the background, as a hinge. It's still a chevron and not a straight line parallel with the pond, but the strap is, and it is very dramatic when the strap, that is constructed in reverse to the whole card, with its weight of content, trees, plops into place forcing the little Vs attached to spread open while forcing its trees to flip up. The trees do not flip until the last moment the card is fully opened flatly and the broad reverse band inside is flat too. So at least there is that. But that is the only thing that is dramatic about this rather blah scene. You don't even get to see the crocodile.