Back to Work! This is a weird one....

Originally had it in mind to get this done to enter into the running for a show at the BCM Gallery, for a show Jenn and I are pulling together called The Yellow Show. But it's just pretty weird, I kind of messed it up in the pictures i chose... but I made one of these once, it was really cool, and sold. So I decided to go ahead and this time take notes on how I did it so I'm not reinventing the wheel every time.

I don't know what these are called.

This one is called Popcornballs at Night.

How to:

First, choose hi res. pics that compliment each other somehow. For this, I used one image and used my minimal "skills"/luck on Paint Shop to mess with it. I only realized AFTER picking up the prints - I should've made the ONLY change between the 2 images be the appearance of the blue ball. duh. To lazy to correct, I press on.

Matte prints are ideal, I went for 8x10.

I decided to use my rotary chopper to slice them both into 1" strips.

I suck at measuring and marking. I'm learning every time. Mostly I'm learning that I'm my own boss so I can do my eyeball-magic/whatever works. But the guide on the chopper helped make this part a lot less painful than the rest. I'd swear my rulers are all inconsistent. My dreams are about stuff like that. I digress.

I found a 20 inch long piece of matt board (way to hoard) and marked it up for 1" stripes, to make a big ol' accordian.

I scored every other line on one side. I remembered from my first one of these that poor scoring made for really gross fuzzy seams on the open folds, so i tried to do better, without cutting all the way through.

Yeah, I know there's a easier way to do this. But I now had to mark and score the OTHER side, and i just couldn't measure 1" strips across the whole thing like i did on the first side. I knew they'd never line up, and that would be a BIG problem. So I kind of extended the lines over the edge AND remeasured, before drawing and scoring the alternate lines on the backside.

Lots of re-scoring later (with my Fiskars finger blade. That thing rocks) my accordian had nice, consistent 1" panels. YESSSSSSSS....

I dropped in all the picture-strips to make sure they fit. Yep.

After messing up the first strips with a FUBAR with sheets of adhesive dots (my handy little scrapbooking roller-adhesives were spent) i went back to my trusty favorite adhesive of all time, DOUBLE SIDED SCOTCH. Taped in left-side panels, then right side, pressing  them into place with my chamois-cloth-like spaceage no-scratch sweater sleeves.

Totally weird but f-ing rad. Now, the really hard part.

The illusion fails if you dont get the folds just-so. The panels have to be at a consistent angle. So I played around with it a bit and decided 1.5" were good intervals for planting the bottom creases to a base. I stuck a super sticky dot at the top and bottom of each line and pressed the folds, one at a time, onto them. Only to find that's too wide and the effect was kind of wonky. So I pulled them all up one at a time and just moved them over a smidge (luckily the dots are big) and eyeballed the angle of the folds.

I hot glued strips of mat board to hold up the last slats. Trust me, all this will make life a million times easier when i figure out some kinf of frame to drop this into.

GET IT??? POPCORN BALLS? THAT TURN BLUE? EXCEPT FOR THE EVIL-SHEEP ONE???