Friday, March 26, 2021

A Year of COVID in 8 Pop-up Book Spreads

A Year of COVID in 8 Pop-up Spreads
Like everyone in the entire world, I spent the last year mostly at home.
How many times had I wished I could just lock myself in my work room and make all the art quilts I had in my head?  How wonderful would it be to isolate from the world and have no interruptions or other obligations???  Well, it turned out, not that wonderful.  I was stuck, and unable to create, so I did what I always do when that happens--I cleaned and rearranged.  One day while rearranging my studio for the 100th time, I came across a stash of cardstock, and started playing around, folding paper, gluing bits of paper onto the folds and embellishing the results with Sharpies--voila!  a crude pop-up!  I had paper; I had glue; I had time.  Things just kind of spun out of control from there.

I scoured the internet for instructional videos on pop-up mechanisms, and am most grateful to Duncan Birmingham and Matthew Reinhart for their detailed videos on YouTube. In the beginning my pop-up pageswere mostly just V-folds with my cartoon drawings glued to them. As time went on, I experimented with more complex mechanisms like the tall syringe (Matthew Reinhart Master Class) and the slide outs (Duncan Birmingham The Pop-up Channel). In spite of these two gurus, my pages are still quite crude and very much the amateur hour, but they pops occupied my mind for hours at a time when I might otherwise have spend time fomenting about the state of the world.
 
If you're a big trump fan, spare yourself the anguish, and go watch a panda video because I am not kind to him in my book.

Here's the link to the Pop-up:

No comments:

Post a Comment