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by James Britt.
Original Post: Paper Engineering: Urban Paper Toys and Pop-up Books
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I’ll be giving a talk at the November 3 meeting of Tiny Army. The topic: Urban paper toys, and pop-up books.
I don’t recall exactly how I got into these things, but it involved art toys, wearable computers, augmented reality, and Arduino hacking.
The general fields of paper craft and paper engineering is pretty broad. If you can think of it, and it involves paper, it’s probably covered. My interests, though, are narrowed to “urban paper” toys, and pop-up books.
The realm of paper toys is also quite large. There are assorted software tools available that allow you to create highly realistic models and turn them into printable, foldable, physical things. Some are fun. Some are, um, sort of creepy .
Urban paper toys, however, put a far greater emphasis on the graphic design than on object construction itself. I’m not sure if there’s a specific, agreed-on definition of urban paper toys, but this video, which goes over the book, Urban Paper Toys, should give you an idea.
You can also find a great many of excellent examples on the Nice Paper Toys site
I’ll be giving a talk at the November 3 meeting of Tiny Army. The topic: Urban paper toys, and pop-up books.
I don’t recall exactly how I got into these things, but it involved art toys, wearable computers, augmented reality, and Arduino hacking.
The general fields of paper craft and paper engineering is pretty broad. If you can think of it, and it involves paper, it’s probably covered. My interests, though, are narrowed to “urban paper” toys, and pop-up books.
The realm of paper toys is also quite large. There are assorted software tools available that allow you to create highly realistic models and turn them into printable, foldable, physical things. Some are fun. Some are, um, sort of creepy .
Urban paper toys, however, put a far greater emphasis on the graphic design than on object construction itself. I’m not sure if there’s a specific, agreed-on definition of urban paper toys, but this video, which goes over the book, Urban Paper Toys, should give you an idea.
You can also find a great many of excellent examples on the Nice Paper Toys site
One way of looking at urban paper toys is imagining a graph with “Construction complexity” as one axis and “Graphic realism” as another. So, in the lower left (say) of this graph you have near-zero construction complexity and near-zero graphic realism. That’s sort of the world that interests me.
Those dimensions aren’t the whole story, of course. The better examples have a degree of sophistication that works because of the balance between just-simple-enough construction, and just-simple-enough design.
Some paper toys have a construction that hard to quantify. I’m especially taken by the work of Nicolas Saloquin, especially his Poe characters. Many of them use nothing more than a partially curled strip of paper or a simple tube for one or another body part, yet the effect is amazing. The visual design is not realistic not complicated, but still deeply expressive.
Urban paper toys, and the culture around them, have much in common with cartoons, comic books and graffiti. It’s a world of formal constraints and limitations where style and personality are more important than complexity or technique.
Pop-up books, while somewhat related, have some different considerations. The lack of complexity in urban paper toys is largely self-imposed. With pop-up books, a certain construction complexity is unavoidable, and greater complexity can pay off big-time. However, all that complexity must still work in the service of design.
Pop-up books have gotten quite sophisticated, not just in their mechanics but in subject matter as well. Matthew Reinhart’s Star Wars book is a marvel. I’m not all that big of a Star Wars fan, but when I saw this book at the second-hand book store I was amazed; that it was available at half-price was a real bonus.
Meanwhile. David Carter’s White Noise showcases imaginative paper engineering for quite a different purpose.
You can see a great many pop-up books in action on YouTube
Pop-up books are harder to make than paper toys. As far as I know there is no generally available software to help with pop-ups as there is for paper toys and models. And precision counts. The lower-complexity paper toys allow for a some amount of cutting leeway. You can be a bit off and still get decent results. With a pop-up, though, you run into compounding errors. If one piece does not fold or bend just right, the next part will not either, and if that’s off, you have real trouble.
Both of these crafts can provide immense satisfaction. There’s something magical about being able to print a picture onto one or two sheets of paper, do some cutting and gluing, and have a thing, an object. I’ve not made any complete pop-ups yet, but it’s been fun to take some basic constructs and mechanisms, apply some variations, and see it actually work. :)
If this sounds at all interesting to you, please come to my talk. I’ll discuss some available software, explain some techniques, and show assorted examples of both paper toys and pop-up books.
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