Harry Potter Pop-Ups

So this weekend is the opening of Gallery Nucleus' Harry Potter Tribute Show! I managed to create two pop-up pieces for the show.

The first piece I made was a re-creation of Hogwarts. The drawing is etched into watercolor paper. There will only be four available. There are still some available here.



The other pop-up I created was the scene where Harry and Ron meet Aragog and he sends his children after them. I wanted to create this scene because it was allowed me to really play with layering for the pop-up. On top of the intricate web I cut, I included lights and a sound chip that plays the Harry Potter theme. You can see it in action in the vimeo video below (sorry about the hand held quality).

Leather cover with hand painted "HP" for Harry Potter.

Full view of interior when it's opened.

Close up of the interior when some of the lights are on.

Ron scared and Harry ready to depend them from the spiders.

Harry Potter Aragog Pop-Up from Jackie Huang on Vimeo.

Lastly, I know some people are wondering how I go about creating my pop-ups. So here's a few photos to help explain my process.

I start out by cutting and taping together scraps of paper to create a rough white mock-up. At this point, all I'm concerned about is making sure the pop-up moves like I want it to and closes flat.

I forgot to take a photo of the pop-up before I tore it apart, but after the white mock, I draw on top of it to start refining the shapes. Then I take it apart and scan each individual piece.

Here's an example of a scanned piece of what I call, "the puzzle".

From there, I create vector lines in Illustrator. Print, cut, and assemble. You can see some blue lines, and that's me refining the shapes some more. I also mark any places that need mechanical changes and then tear apart and re-scan. Print, cut and assemble again. I repeat this process over and over until everything works. Sometimes it takes 2 tries, other times, it's taken up to 8.

Before I start illustrating the pop-up, I do a super rough color comp. This just allows me to get a sense of the color palette and value structure I'm going to strive to create.

After that, I move to illustrating each individual piece. I leave a little bleed on each image and you can see here some cut and fold lines I'll use to guide myself later.

After all of that, I move to cut and assemble the final piece. Total time to create this Aragog pop was around 25 hours?