Plane

Images today come from the first page in the pop up book. This is the journey by plane to Japan. I thought the top down point of view, allowed for a dynamic composition. I’m planning if time allow to put some oxygen masks on strings inside the plane body. This will be a nice touch, but only done if I get time after doing the main pages.

Battle

Just a quick update. I’ve been working on various pop-up for the Oshima book, above are some photos of a battle with mountain Oni from the story.
This has been a fun page to put together. You can see that I have used the page as a ‘ground’ which the characters stand on at 90 degrees to the page. This forces the reader to reorientate the book when viewing. It’s go to keep the view engaged.

Oshima

In the above images you can see the final inked Madam Monster. This sequence is showing the final stages of putting an image into the pop up page. Then the second sequence demonstrates how the hinge works.

This page is the first of the finished pages I am working on fopr the Oshima Picture Book Museum competition. I still have to add a lot more characters and detail before it is finished. The pop up on this page is very simple, just 2 folding flaps that form the central bridge. Extra depth is achieved on this page by layering images that building them up on top of each other.

Process

At the moment I am working on the image elements of my Oshima Picture Book Museum pop-up book entry for 2010 (see http://www.ehonkan.or.jp). As I plan to make 2 to 4 versions of this book I’m drawing each image at least 4 times. In the image (left) you can see character images repeated at the first inking stage. As the process for me involves creating pop-up mechanics as stages to put characters on, I draw the characters individually and paste them in to position.

When I work on an individual image I use a very simple process to build the image up. The image (above) of the monster geisha you can see the beginning process of my image building. I start with pencil, then ink over with minimal detail and then start building up the colour layers. I will record and post the progress of this image as it develops.