I seem to keep finding new and fun
things to do. This time it’s pop-up
flowers. While surfing thru You Tube for something totally unrelated,
I ran onto a video showing how to make pop-up flowers for greeting cards. Oh my.
I’ve been making my own greeting cards for just ages and have always
wanted to do pop-ups but never took the time to explore. There are several videos on You Tube showing
the technique, search for 'pop-up card'. Most of the tutorials
show how to do the flower design with markers or colored pencils but I don’t
have enough colored markers on hand and don’t intend to buy a bunch of the
right markers. So I chose to make them
in Photoshop. Getting a perfectly proportioned template was the hardest but I
think I have a couple good designs going now.
The basic technique is to cut 7
squares of paper about 3.5” to 4” or whatever size you want. Fold them onto themselves into halves 3 times
so there are 8 layers of paper. Remember
making paper snowflakes when you were a kid?
This is the same concept. Then
cut the petal end into shape desired. Unfold and there should be 8 petals on the
flower. Using markers or colored
pencils, design each petal as desired.
The You Tube videos show some nice examples on how to do that. Then cut out one petal, overlap the first
petal by the cut onto the next one by the cut and glue. Voila, a pretty flower.
In Photoshop, I designed and colored
the flower, saved and copied/pasted into a Word document. By decreasing the side margins of my
document, I can get 4 flowers on a sheet of paper. Print and separate the flowers, fold and cut as
described above. Another glory of Photoshop is that the color can easily be changed without making a whole new flower.
The videos also show how to glue the
flowers together. I put together a
tutorial on how to do that cuz I didn’t want to open the video each time and at
that point, I really didn’t want to mess up the gluing.
Use your imagination. I’m really having fun with it. I’d really like to try other pop-up too, lots
of ideas running thru my brain.