My sister had suggested that I go to boards to take a look at the pop-up cards that they had at Borders. My daughter and I went for a trip.
My plan was initially to look for a book on pop-up while my daughter was looking at the toy section. It turns out the only book on pop-up was on that I had taken out from the library. Anyway it hadn’t occurred to me but book stores do sell pop-up books. It worked out well for everyone. My daughter got a magic box kit (which made her very happy) and I got to study the art and mechanics of a bunch of pop-up books that were frankly inspiring. (The only downside was the some of the display books where beat on pretty bad and no longer functioned properly). It’s sort of a shame that my daughter is at an age where pop-up reading books aren’t that exiting to her any more… When she was little, one of her favorite’s was Alpha bugs.. It looks like there is a more advanced version out there which was sort of fun to go through and reminiscence with her. The technical feats that are in some of these books are darn impressive. I wish sheckels were not so tight. I would have bought a bunch of these masterpieces and took them home to study in more detail. I was suffering from a bit of brain overload with amount of clever mechanisms I saw there. It seems almost as there is a bit of competition going on there as far books seeming to want to out compete each other on spectacular effects.
After we were done in the toy section we had some fun checking out the pop-up card display that they had there. Oddly enough this appears to be more appealing to a seven year old than a pop up book. On the down side these cards basically only unfold 90 degrees, while what I’m interested in doing is at 180. Most of the cards had a little pull tab that would have the model do something. I need to think on this some more, but that would be sort of cool for my little project.
I think it’s about time that I start working on the Mark II prototype. This time instead of copy paper I think I’m going to use card-stock.