Relenzo's Somewhat Competent Terrain

[Relenzo2]

Next up: Papercraft Giant Lillypads!

I wasn't expecting this thread to have a theme. But, uh, I do really like things that go in water!

I have been really impressed by some of the papercraft terrain that's been created on this site over the years. Especially AliasQTips huts and sandbag bunkers, of course! After putting a few of these together, and seeing how they worked, it was a matter of time before I thought: Hey, maybe I could use papercraft to design my own terrain!

These lillypads are pretty simple from an engineering standpoint, but I do like having lillypads.

The basic plan was to be simple: I would scrap Google for pictures of lillypads, and use clippings to create a hexagonal base and six small raised edges, just like giant lillypads have. This was the first take:



Assembly is pretty simple. The bottom side is smaller than the top side, so that they fit together. I scored the bases of all the flaps with an Xacto knife. Then, I folded the flaps "inwards" on the top piece, and taped each flap to its two neighbors with very small pieces of masking tape.

That's a bit obnoxious, admittedly. But the scale here is tiny--it was the only thing that worked. Using paper flaps and glue to keep those side flaps attached to each other (and hence vertical) just wasn't working out. But the tape, once I became accustomed to cutting out small strips of it with a scissors, worked perfectly. Then I just had to attach the bottom piece on with white glue!

My journey wasn't done, however. Once assembled out of cardstock it held together well physically, but it still didn't look as great as I envisioned. I tried cutting out a wedge-shaped slice so that it would look more "lillypad-ish" but it just wasn't quite there:



I think we can do just a little bit better.

Eventually, I determined that the issue was that I was being too literal-minded. I had clipped the image for the top from, as you might guess, actual pictures of giant lillypads. The kind that kids are actually able to sit on in real life. However, giant lillypads look a little different form most lillypads. They have this dark green, veined surface which is different from the "stereotypical lillypad" look.

Eventually I decided that the "stereotypical lillypad" look is exactly what I needed. I needed to get this to read as a lillypad, and that meant leaning into imagery that people were already familiar with. There's an archetypical idea of what a lillypad's surface looks like--and by scanning images of smaller, ordinary-size lillypads, I was able to find it and apply it to my template:



It's much more obvious what this is supposed to be! Well, the template looks a bit funny, but the weird part is the result of some image mirroring, and it's in the section we're going to cut out anyway. Assembled, it looks like this:



As you can see, I added flowers to half of them for even more recognizable imagery!

I'm really happy with these now. Small figures can walk on them, so I can create little bridges across rivers and other water features!