Ant-Man (Scott Lang) paper cutout
My six-year-old LOVED the Ant-Man movie, immediately requesting I make him an Ant-Man for his room on the drive home from the theatre. The problem (such that it is) is that his is the DC characters bedroom (his younger brother gets Marvel characters), and, well, my own sense of order wouldn’t let me mix Scott Lang with his wall of characters. So I had to come up with a creative solution.
The solution so far when I want to give the boys a little something different than that which would fit in the main collage is to frame it, as I did with the Bat Family, Scribblenauts, and Super Friends. But what to do with a single character?
I thought for a moment to show Ant-Man shrinking, since that would work well with the tiered shadow boxes I use. But that sounded really hard, man. When drawing shrinking, you only have to draw the parts that aren’t covered by the progression. When cutting it out of paper, you have to do it all, which would meant cutting out that helmet four times or so. Pass.
Now, the fun of Ant-Man is, of course, that’s he’s small. That he hangs out with bugs is a close second (at least for a six-year-old). So I needed to incorporate those two things. At first, I considered just putting a small cutout in the same 12 x 12 frames I’ve been using, but the thing about little kids is that they don’t really appreciate the value of negative space.
I considered just recreating chrissamnee‘s variant cover for Ant-Man #1 in full, but quickly decided that making all those bullets would be boring. Plus, while making small cutouts is a fun challenge and my son likes having them, it does prevent me from doing the character full justice.
Then I remembered the EW magnifying glasses cover for Ant-Man, and the inspiration had hit: I could do BOTH a small Ant-Man and a detailed one (both based on Samnee’s awesome cover). So what you see is the framed picture my son got: the small Ant-Man (about 2.5 inches wide) is pasted onto a blank background with a magnified version hovering over top of it. Lift the magnified version and you see the small one. My son gets his very own lift the flap art piece!
