Ceridwyn

Now that ‘Gaijin Holiday’ is safe in Japan and I have had a break from cutting, pasting and drawing. It is time to start the next project. I am trying to develop a completely new story and new characters. I am currently thinking and sketching a new work called ‘Ceridwyn’. Ceridwyn is a welsh name from a classic welsh fable about the bard Talisen. The witch Ceridwyn is a central character in the beginning of this story. As my wife is called Ceri (derived from Ceridwyn) and my son is called Tallis (obviously derived from Talisen), I thought it a good starting point. I have decided to not concentrate on the traditional story of Ceridwyn and Talisen but rather draw Ceridwyn up as a story character in her own right. I will concentrate on misadventures of Ceridwyn the witch, with her faithful sidekick, Mif the cat. I have a rough story mocked up on scrap paper and a few sketches already. I plan to try some pop-up images as well as traditional 2D stuff. Above is from the first set of sketches. So if you’re interested in the writing and design process, keep coming as I plan to keep up dating my progress.

ForgFolds

Today I’m have put together some of my images from the last page that I made in my Oshima pop-up book ‘Gaijin Holiday’. This page was the battle between Josh and Tallis and the frog Samurai of Matsumoto. The above photos are in 2 sets, 1st one show the original sketch where I was leaning more towards Kabuki characters. It also shows the page as a blank. In the blank page photos you can see the underlying paper mechanism is a set of basic map folds. I like map folds, they are relatively simple to construct and they look dynamic when you open them. This page only became more complicated because I had to get all of the arms and swords to fold back into the page. This required some planning as when they folded the sword tips would often catch behind the heads of the characters and bend the wrong way. As a result when you unfolded the page, the swords were all over the place.
The 2nd image is a series of images showing the unfolding of the page. This might give you some insight as to how the folds collapse on each other.