Picture it, Long Beach, 2011. I had decided that I was going to design a papercraft rocket ship to accompany my new Mr. Roboto papercraft. It was much more challenging to create than the Mr. Roboto, as I wanted it to have that classic bulb shape at the top and angular landing gear. After a bit of trial and error, I was able to pull it together pretty well, if I don’t say so myself.
Now it’s been a few years since I put one together, and I was riding high after my successful Kickstarter campaign, so I thought I’d cut out a new rocket using the same material that I used for my Mr. Roboto pledges [they were made with photo paper rather than just plain old cardstock]. I popped the computer on to pull the file up, but much to my surprise, the file was gone!
I proceeded to dig through all of my back up disks and archives. Anywhere I would have put the file, but much to my chagrin, I couldn’t find it. I was a little heartbroken at the thought of having to start the process over from scratch, but then I remembered that I had uploaded a JPG layout to the Costco Photo site [initially I was unhappy with how it printed because I didn’t like the color and was going to go back and adjust it, but never got around to it… it takes about 3 hours to cut one of these suckers out, so I really had to be in the mood to do it]. I logged in, and thankfully it was still there [bless you Costco! #Costco4eva].
I still needed a proper source file [Adobe Illustrator] so that I could make color adjustments as needed, and maybe play with the design a bit [à la Graffiti Pride-bot]. And thus began the process of redrawing the pieces in Illustrator. Granted, being able to scan the print [I couldn’t save the JPG back from Costco Photo, lame, so I had to print it to scan it] was a much more desirable process to having to break apart my first model [which I still have, remarkably] and scan the individual pieces, especially since I had made modifications since then.
So, long story short… I made a rocket… again!
