and a very Harry Potter Birthday to You!

It's my youngest brother's 14th Birthday tomorrow, and per usual, I have to make the birthday card; therefore using a combination of his love for trains - especially steam engines "because they have more character" and Harry Potter (and the fact that as a birthday treat, joint with my other brother's 16th, at the end of the month, we are going to the Harry Potter Studio Tour) this was the final product!

Final Birthday Card

For the  card I have used a combination of raised and flat pieces of card. The base of the card was all flat to the base-card, however, as I built up the image of the train, I chose the main features to make them for 3D. I did this by bending and manipulating the flat pieces of paper.

This is the original sketch of the card design. To make sure that all the separate pieces of the paper fit together and are the correct size, I overlaid the drawing onto the colours papers, and drew over in a biro with quite a pressure. This makes an indented line onto the coloured paper, and it means that you know where to cut, but it also won't leave a pen or pencil line.

As you do pieces which may be overlapped, you draw over the lines, for this is only the design guide.

To help connect the raised pieces to the flat paper, I used various bits of cardboard stuck together to create a variation of heights, in relation to how much the piece of design has been raised.

Final Smoke Box piece

 I cut all the letters and numbers out separately instead of drawing them on, because it went with the overall design of the card. Everything else had been cut out of paper, and therefore it felt only right to use that method for the whole card.

Sneaky Design Tip: With the lantern, to make it yellow, but not a bright yellow colour, I overlaid the yellow paper with three sheets of tracing paper. This therefore destaurated the yellow, but still kept a hint of the colour, so it wasn't just white.