Day 35: Instructions to make something

I really did mean to get this put up yesterday, and despite having a long day that included my car stalling out twice, a tow truck, being out of the house from first thing in the morning until about eight at night, I still got this project more or less done.I was tired but feeling accomplished when I hooked up the camera to upload my instructional video by eleven at night.
Then it took two hours, a lot of alt+ctrl+del and at least one restart of the computer just to upload what was on the camera. I also couldn't do anything else during this process, like post to the blog that this post would be delayed. Attempting to do other things like, say, move the mouse, resulted in complete computer lock-up.
Putting it all together this morning has been a slow process, too, but only slow instead of disastrous. As with the disguise project, this entry is pretty much about the video. I made a flaying monkey pop-up card, and with the video you can make one too! The first thing you need to do is download the PDF and print it out on your home computer. I've included two versions, the color one you'll see in the video and a black and white version in case you want to color it yourself.
PDF is a pretty standard file format, but just in case you don't have a PDF reading program (they're free), I recomment CutePDF.com which ironically works way better than the original PDF reading program Acrobat (which is by Adobe who originally created the file format in the first place!).
Got your PDF reading program? Acrobat or CutePDF either should work fine. Click the link below for whichever version you want, or both. Make a whole army of flying monkey cards!
Black and white flying monkey card
Color flying monkey card
Once this is printed out, preferably on card stock, just watch the video below! The joy of a video tutorial is that you can pause it if you need to gather supplies or something.



About the book: This massive Wizard of Oz pop-up book is by Robert Sabuda, who describes himself as a paper engineer. You should visit his website for lots of pop-up tutorials and stuff, which is not what I did, because I was away from the computer when I created this project, and because my brain hasn't been working very well this week.
A friend who's a kind of surrogate uncle gave me this book, and along with it he sent some print-outs about Robert Sabuda and his work, so that was my introduction to him as an artist. I'm not sure how hard the book is to come by, but I highly recommend it. A lot of the papers in it are metallic and some of the pop-ups are incredibly, beautifully complex. Paper engineer is a very accurate title for this guy.
I'm not sure this project really does justice to his work, and I apologize for it being both late and a little ramblingly incoherent. The video was made late last night, and I'm still feeling a little rough today because yesterday was such a mess. My car and my computer are both old, and cranky, but at least for the moment they're still hanging in there.