Finished

I have been up to 1am nearly every night for the last month. Working away in the late hours on painting, drawing, cutting, folding and gluing my pop-up book for the World handmade Picture Book Competition (Oshima Picture Book Museum). Last night (or this morning) at 2:30am I finished this 3 month long project. This morning I put it in the post and now I will wait and see what Japan will make of ‘Gaijin Holiday’. I’ll keep you posted. I will also endeavour to go back over some of my working process images and upload some interesting folds and techniques.

Osaka

Now that I’m getting close to finishing this book, I am finding some time (with help from my wife) to photograph some of the pages from the story. The images above shows some details from the pop up section from the book for the 2nd page. The story is based on our travels last year in Japan. In this scene we were visiting the Osaka Expo Park. When we went to the park I was hoping to go to the International Institute for Children’s Literature, which is in the park. Unfortunately the Institute was closed for renovations. But we did find this boat in one of the play grounds. My sons Josh and Tallis played a game of chasings with some junior high school girls (Fuka, Chiako, Mao and Konomi).
In the story the boat changes in Josh and Tallis’s Imagination from a play ground boat to a real boat and the girls are transformed into mermaids. I have also included the orginal sketches and plan drawings from my travel book.

Cams

Above are a selection of picture that show the processes of creating a paper cam for a popup book. These are used to create movement on a page. In my Oshima book, so far I have used a single cam attached to a boat to give it a rocking movement through the water and the double cam shown here is the workings for 2 sword arms fighting an army of ninjas.