Folded pop-up mini-zine
My friend the wonderful JP has been making an online halloween calendar for 18 years now. It's amazing. There is a selection 31 works of art behind 31 doors by 31 different artists. They are released one a day during the whole month of October, so the name of the website is Gothtober.
For the last 4 years I've been making paper based projects accompanied by a short 3 minute video on how to make them. I'm pretty happy with how this year's project turned out so here are some details.
This year my plan was to make a one page pop-up card people could download and make. I usually make the Gothtober projects into a single printed page so this time I went for the classic single sheet of paper, 8 page zine fold. There are lots of instructions online for how to fold this one, here is a good video or you can check out the instructions on wikibooks.
Then I found a pop-up fold that would be easy to make for begginners. Using the basic angle fold below gave me some ideas, so I decided to repeat it 3 times to keep things simple.
After that I sketched some ideas for animals I could Illustrate. I wanted to choose animals that were a little creepy but also fun, also a little different, since bats, ravens and spiders are a little overrepresented in halloween decorations.
I chose the pufferfish, the magpie (a raven's cousin) and the wonderfully weird opossum. You are probably familiar with these animals from the 100 day project drawings.
These are my original pencil sketches:
Why these creatures in particular you ask?
Well, the pufferfish, known as Fugu in Japan, contains a pretty serious neurotoxin that has killed a good number of people who tried to eat it. That's pretty creepy.
Magpies belong to the Corvidae family, like ravens and crows, and they have a reputation for being quite smart and mischievous.
And opossums, well, they have a bifurcated penis, they can fake their own death and they have 13 nipples, arranged in a circle of 12 with one in the middle which is pretty goth in my book.
Visual Style
I thought the cut paper style you often see in decorations for the Mexican Day of the Day would be fitting. It's called papel picado which means "pecked paper". I drew the designs on an iPad using Procreate but they follow the style as there are no "islands" so they could potentially be cut out of paper. These are the finished animal illustrations:
I placed them on a single page using this template I made that establishes the margins and where the cuts and folds go:
And this is a preview of the final version that includes a front and a back cover:
And here the mouth action of all the characters:
To see the 3 minute assembly video and to get a printable PDF of this project please go to day 21 at gothtober.com.
I hope your halloween is just the right amount of spooky, and as always thank you very much for your support!
Federico