Writing My Friends Pirate Letters

if i was captaining a ship through the seven seas what else would i be doing than writing elaborate letters to my friends for their birthdays i know a lot of you might be able to relate to this one so i have been planning this since i made the victorian letters last year i had the idea to make an interactive treasure map pop-up card it sounds very complicated i did over complicate it and then i'll add other little bits to the letter along with that theme pirates starting with the easy part is it the easy part pirate themed stickers process is the same as the last video drawing them on some label paper that i have and then lined them ink and deliver i'm doing two letters so i had to draw two sets of the same sets of stickers you know what i like to tell myself imperfect drawings add charm some of them i use to put on the card myself and some of them i send to them to use however they would like to perhaps they have other pirate friends that they would like to send a letter to i don't know where every time i'm about to draw a circle my hand starts getting like five times shakier i think it's all the built-up anticipation as far as coloring goes i use mainly alcohol markers but also just whatever i have laying around and i do stick to a relatively small color palette browns tans blues and greens much like the sea and the beach and stuff but we gotta shake it up a little bit since this is a pirate theme i thought why not add some kind of metallic element to them because obviously once you add metallic paint to something it's automatically treasure i don't make the rules they are drawn to treasure like fines to dead flesh so i went in and added some gold and silver metallic details it looks really cool in the light it has just that subtle metallic shiny texture so after they were all drawn and colored i had to cut them out i like to leave a little white border around the edge first of all it makes it easier to cut out but also it just looks a little bit cleaner to me once the stickers were done we need to age some paper folding crumpling give it some texture i already knew in advance that i was going to use some of this for the treasure map card part as well so i went ahead and sized that to the envelopes i tore some of the edges to make it look more like an old treasure map apparently starbucks gives away their brewed coffee for people to use for their compost and my brother had gotten some of that so i just decided i was gonna use a little bit of that i used a coffee filter to essentially make what was a tea bag i guess but with coffee putting all the coffee into the filter and then tying it up with a string just swirl it around in some hot water and started laying in the paper to soak in all that delicious recycled coffee juice i'm using my same graduation ropes in the shower to create a drying line the sizes of everything really depends on the envelopes i didn't have any new card sized envelopes i did have a couple cards sent to me recently so i thought i could reuse those envelopes started repairing any rips covered the outside with the aged paper i used some brown watercolor to simulate some heavier coffee stains painted it on a bottle stamped it on there you had some dripped stains as well all i had to do was glue on the paper and voila new old looking envelopes i always like to make the outside of the envelopes interesting because i think it just makes it a little bit more special when it comes in the mayo painted waves on the front with light blue i made them kind of stylized and very line heavy with the envelope that was more intact i painted the back flap light blue to cover the torn part on the other one i covered it with light blue paper no one will ever know they were old envelopes except for all of you at least one of my friends is probably going to watch this so who didn't see anything right the letters are the most important part of all of this to go along with the theme i had the idea to go with sort of the message in the bottle concept but like 2d i cut out a bottle shape from some plastic packaging material that i had and then also cut out a little back pocket so that i can slip the letter into that and it will look like it will be in the bottle i cut a cork shape out of paper board and started painting it to look sort of like that cork texture just with browns spotting on different texture i thought the bottle looked a little bit too plain when it was fully clear so i also painted some highlights on one side to give it a little bit more interest and then we needed to write our letters ahoy matey it's been long since our ships have passed each other by i hope the pike has been treated kindly by our lady and settled in calm waters i'm afraid her favor seems to have passed me by recently as waters have been rough in the late days of september went to bed one night in good spirits and with a lightness in my heart i did the next morning before i knew it i had awoken to the nastiest storm i've seen in years throughout me quarters to try and soothe her but as i stood at the helm a wave rose clear up over the banister and soaked me properly for a moment i thought for sure the loon was going to be thrown asunder and eye along with it finally caught by the brine deep we've been dealing with a wreckage ever since and that damp chill still haunts me every once in a while putting that aside at least the sun shines brightly on us in these coming days to welcome the day of yore the winds have calmed and the fair weather waits to greet you like an old friend and i as well may your timbers hold strong and your sails drawing near on these so special days of november with each cry of the gulls i miss your companionship more we must plan to dock at a common port soon i am often fondly reminded of our time spent together as a crew when we called the moon our bunkmate and invented games with what we could scavenge from the ship though captaining is surely a fine life there is not much i wouldn't give to spend another night in the galley as three but out on these open waters it is at least a comfort to know that the distance between our hearts is as the growth lies as we are free to travel any direction without barrier this sea we call home may be vast but in it we are home together i've included some spoils pillaged in our time apart in the hope that they can make your day just a little richer good fortune kind favor and make gusts always fill your sails with heart and vigor captain gloom walker if you're wondering where to start when writing a pirate letter all you have to do is write exactly what you would in a normal letter but just layer it under a thousand different ship metaphors i folded up the pirate letter as small as i possibly could to finish it off i used a strip of red tissue paper attached it to the letter and then just wrapped it all the way around sort of like a ribbon in the middle of a scroll and our letter in the bottle was done then we had to make our treasure map card i essentially went into this not knowing anything about pop-ups i'm coming out of it also not knowing much about pop-ups i watched a lot of different videos from the pop-up channel if anyone is interested in making their own pop-ups totally recommend that channel it has almost everything you could possibly want to know the whole idea was to make an interactive treasure map i decided i wanted to do three different pop-up elements a ship and a kraken in more simple 2d pop-ups essentially i just painted them i'm using cardstock for all of this to make sure that it's nice and sturdy so i went ahead and painted the kraken and the ship and lined them with ink again sticking with the color palettes it is in fact 100 possible to over engineer a birthday card because that is exactly what i did with the compass i'm an engineer that means i create problems painted at the compass face with of course the blues and the browns as well sticking with our color palette always of course i have to add a gold element so i painted a couple of the different directional arrows gold and i also painted the central arrow gold as well now in order to make it spin but also keep it pretty flat i basically took the idea of a paper fastener and made it with paper poked a hole in the middle of the face and then threaded it through that so that it could spin and i stuck a final circle piece on the back to keep it on this is going to be a card with an insert on the inside so i had to paint some dark brown trim on all the edges of the card once all the pieces were made it's time to start assembling this bad boy i started with the far away pop-ups they need to be threaded under the insert so that you won't see the inner mechanisms glue the long tab to the middle fold cut a slit in the top matte paper for the piece to go through threaded the pop-up piece through the back of the slit and attached the bottom fold of that onto the card so that the actual piece will be anchored onto the card but it'll still be pulled by the piece that is attached to the center fold i've made an envelope to put directly onto the map that you could open and i'm gonna put these stickers inside of that then once we had all of these things done i had to paint the actual map onto that inside sheet i was just doing this randomly but i feel like unconsciously i kind of made it look like the u.s which is uh quite disappointing this is supposed to be a fantasy island so i painted in some different land forms and terrain some trees a waterfall some mountains the beach some palm trees then it was time to work on the focal point of the card which is the pop-up treasure chest so this is a box pop-up the way the box pop-up works is it has two long strips that are folded into box shapes and set along the center fold line to make folding a lot easier it's the best to go ahead and score with a relatively blunt object so i went ahead and painted some kind of wooden paneling on the sides of the chest and then i continued the wood paneling around the front the front and back pieces attached to the sides of the pop-up there's also a center fold on that so that everything closes when you fold the card but the back piece is a little bit taller so that it includes the lid of the treasure chest painted the top part of the open chest with some gold there would be the chest and then i just finished off painting all of the other details on the outside obviously we need to put a lock on it put all of our file elements onto the map attach the envelope and the compass and then our final step is of course drawing the path to where the treasure is and painting our red x to mark the spot now once the interior of the cards was done i had to design the front of it kind of feel like i'm going to regret saying this later but um i've been really wanting to paint something lately so i'm actually really excited about this and now that i've said that i'm sure this is going to go horribly wrong i decided to paint seascapes inspired by the absolutely beautiful work of ivasovsky inspired not of equal skill level i'm using reference from a bunch of different photos and artworks and essentially we're just painting waves i don't know why i chose to do waves because i've tried to paint bodies of water for a very long time and they always turn out not very good but the theme called for it so i painted two different seascapes just to keep it interesting for me mainly and of course i had to sneak in some poetry to complete our card on search for gold we travel through the sea of vibrant blue follow the map only to find the treasure here is you it's cheesy and i love it i had to add a tiny kraken on the back holding a happy birthday sign because you can't just leave it fully blank that's a crime even if we are pirates that is without doubt the worst pirate i have ever seen now of course i'm sending them tea what do pirates need more than some peach cobbler tea on the sea it needs its own envelope as well i've already made so many envelopes you get the point so let's just seal it with the sticker let's be honest that's the exciting part i also carried the waves from the envelopes onto this as well there was a lot of empty space so i decided to add some birds which was obviously a great idea of course i had to give us all captain names i don't know if they were great captain names but i tried my very best we stick our one postage stamp on there and uh hope for the best to be honest let's see our pirate letters [Music] upon the sails and learned how to be free at starboard we don the roads he traveled with the breeze [Applause] is [Music] our lady carries all our hearts [Music] [Applause] [Music] call upon [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] we spend our days and so off our letters fly by carrier pigeon and uh hopefully they'll arrive before the end of the year on these scenes you never know truly am the luckiest to have these two friends in my life i honestly can't even say it here the impact that they have had on my life don't know where i would be without them i wish i could do more for them but until then i guess i'll be dressing up like a pirate to write letters if anyone is interested in seeing the making of some of the little bits and pieces of this pirate world the pirate costume and also creating different props and setting up the captain's quarters that will be over on patreon you were all a huge reason that i can continue making videos there are obviously quite a few people out there sending letters i don't know if anyone out there has done pirate letters but if you have i would love to see them tell me what your pirate name would be i'm sure it'll be better than the ones that i came up with good luck out there on the seven seas my friend [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: MechanicalFiend

Views: 28,750

Keywords: MechanicalFiend, craft, letter, penpal, pirates, snail mail

Id: eMtz1tb5xRE

Length: 16min 9sec (969 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021