About a year ago I was trying to come up with a Christmas gift for a close friend who happens to be a big Calvin and Hobbes fan. I couldn’t find any perfect themed gifts online, so I decided to try to make something. I’d experimented a bit with paper cutting (perhaps I’ll post about those projects later), and I thought I might be able to make my own versions of some of the illustrations. I choose this strip, which was the last one in the series.

I started by finding some reasonably good quality (digital) versions of the first and last panels, blowing them up, cropping them to 8″ squares and printing them out. Then I went to a craft store and spent entirely too long deciding which individual sheets of cardstock most closely matched the colors in the strip.

Then, I started cutting. I taped the printed copy to a white sheet and used an Xacto knife to cut out everything that wasn’t snow.

Then came all the tiny colorful pieces. I decided to let all the black lines just show through from the back sheet, but the colorful bits all needed to be cut out just right to fit into the spaces in the white sheet. Some of them took lots of tries, but I eventually got them to work. I glued them down to get this.

Finally, I added the white sheet back on top and put the whole thing in a frame to keep it together. (I decided not to glue the white sheet down, just because.)

Then I repeated the process for the last panel of the strip.