Pop-ups in progress

These are all just photos from the crappy camera on my phone of the studio space in my little home and the pieces I have been working on here. I designed the work cabinet with knock out pin hinges so the doors can become a table top, and it has been a dream come true to live and work in this little studio place that still leaves enough room for other people to live in the house too! I will be adding more images to this post as I go along.

I am building the fourteen pop up illustrations for the novel I have written in the course of my recovery from my broken legs. I intend to make 20 copies of the book. My little joke is that I see a time coming when we will all have to frugally ration our electrical usage, and when that time comes, since we are so hooked on super stimulating media, we will NEED reader engaging books with 3D action parts! It's like a whole interactive story game with  multi dimensional, take you inside and play with them illustrations: totally analogue and using zero electricity! Anyways.... While my life has been shrink wrapped re-growing my bones and healing my body I have been so incredibly grateful to have had my own private, safe, and stable world to exist in; inside my home and inside my mind in writing this book. Now that it is winter time it is the perfect time to work on the pop ups because I can throw the scraps of the paper into the fire to keep my warm.

 I am editing the last 80 pages, and once that process of finished I have a few friends friends who have agreed to read it for me and give me constructive feedback. So far it is a 717, 480 words, 376 page choose your own adventure/perspective story, but not the typical format. The reader can't choose actions with omniscient fore knowledge of what to expect, they juts have decide which chapter to go to based on the title, and  go with the flow, or back up and make a different choice if they want to. It is written in three sections,  each distinct in and of themselves, moving from past, to present, to personal. It is titled "Light & Smoke". 

 I have been learning to paint with watercolors

Pattern pieces

 making blank test

  assembling cut parts

feeding the fire

 

  last step before it's finished, not the final image.

 
design and construction

 

Assembly step by step.

toothpicks before adding the diamonds and after

clothes pin clamps

 

This is an illustration of an angel of light, bending it into the colors of the rainbow through the prisms of her diamond fingers, while resting in the One Place. In the book this is a part of a dream sequence.

Pages with pieces to be cut

cut and folded

internal supports glued and clamped

What twenty of the assemblies looks like

What one of the assemblies looks like

For this pop-up each little house ha a floor, here are two ready to be attached to their base pages

Little apartment building with light coming in through the windows, and two rooms that can be made completely dark.

A whole neighborhood of the little apartment buildings.

This is an illustration of an orb of feathers dumped into a nest of pine needles and leaves in a grove of trees at the back of an industrial park, bordered by a chain link fence. There light spills though the trees, through the feather cloud, and casts shadows across the parking lot on the other side of the fence.