Comic
A few weeks ago I got to ride with Dan Harrison, NSMB’s resident scholar of Middle English. That ride reminded me how much I loved Tolkien’s translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight when I was a child. I was itching to make something weird out of paper, and this is the result.
Behind the Scenes
This was a bit of a beast to make, so here’s a quick look at what went into it: I had the format lined up before I had any sort of story. I’ve been diving deeper into paper engineering, and wanted to do another warm-up piece before I pitched some commercial projects. So I decided to do something technically simple, with limited scope. Only one form of layered-pop-up, no dimensional sculpture, or interactive elements, three planes per frame, five frames for the whole story.
From there, I came up with this super simple story, based on that interaction with Dan. Then I did a bunch of eight grade geometry, figuring out all my dimensions and angles.
The base of each frame is a triangle with one 72° angle, and two 54° angles. That means that all five frames combined make a 360° rotatable sculpture. I wanted the aspect ratio of the face of each frame to be 16×20, since that’s a standard paper size, so the two legs of each triangle had to be 13.61 units long.
I used “units” intentionally, because I drew everything in inches, and then printed and built it in centimeters. I always like to draw everything bigger than it’s going to be printed, so effectively I just drew everything at 2.54 scale, and then shrank it down to print and build. No converting between units.
To make my life easy, I situated the mid-ground of each image 8 cm from the vertex of the triangle.
Messy chicken scratch, figuring out my lengths and angles.
With that done, I just had to draw everything. I won’t go into too much detail here, the process was similar to my Christmas piece with a little bit of extra fiddling to line everything up, and give myself guidelines to cut and fold. Procreate isn’t meant to be used like this, but it’s pretty easy to figure out workarounds to create templates, and take measurements using its built-in tools.
As I finished drawing each frame, I printed them, and did a super rough cut and paste job to make sure everything worked.
This was the first time I knew this concept had legs. The fold down the center allows the whole thing to fold in on itself like a card.
Drawing ended up taking me a long time. I wanted the book to feel rich and detailed, and detail takes time. I recycled some fancy frames from other projects to add depth.
All-in, I spent an average of five hours on each frame, drawing and coloring. That means this comic ended up being quite the time investment.
Once I had everything drawn and colored, I printed each layer out on “presentation paper” – basically matte cardstock that takes ink like photo paper would.
Five frames, three layers per frame, all printed and ready to cut out.
By this point I was, uh, beat. But I still had the hard part ahead of me. Cutting out these frames feels like riding a consequential, slow speed rock roll trail. You’re inching along, trying to find traction, feel what the cut is going to do, and modulate the tiny edge of the knife along the lines, without screwing up because the consequences are big. I didn’t do myself any favors with the design here, because I knew that these would look way cooler if they had delicate bits of paper floating in each frame.
With that all done, I went back through, and used a grey marker to color all the cut edges. This goes a long way towards hiding mistakes, and the little fluffy strings of paper that can get left behind. With that done, I had each frame reduced into three latices of art.
All three layers, ready for assembly
I pre-scored everything before I cut out each page, so all I had to do now was make my folds, and use double-sided tape to hold it all together. This part was pretty chill, but I’d also put six or so hours into each frame by this point, so I really didn’t want to screw up.
Just one more seam to tape and this frame is done.
With all that done, all I had left to do was shoot the final product. I set up a makeshift studio laying in my driveway, and made it happen. I also cajoled my partner into letting me shoot her “reading” the book. I’ve included a little cut below.
I love how dimensional and immersive the final product is.
For Now
Bleh. I am absolutely exhausted. This project ended up taking a lot longer than I’d hoped. But I’m pretty stoked about the final product. This was a great test piece and my mind is spinning with ideas of where I want to take it next. I want do do this at a larger scale! I want to do more dimensional sculptures! I want to work with a professional videographer to better communicate the experience of actually holding and reading the book. But for now, well, I’ve gotta take a nap.
Finally, it’s easier than you might think to get into making pop-up books like this. You should make your own! Please hit me with any questions you might have, and I’ll do my best to answer them with my limited knowledge.
