Pop-Up Flowers

slisen.blogspot.com

(Click on photos to enlarge)

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.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In this picture, I saved the petals that I cut from the flower and made a design on the front of the card.  And in the last photo, I printed the pink flower on light pink paper instead of white. 

 

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.