June 2024 Pop-up

Ploppy Sig Reans His Cloom

Idea

Usually, if I don’t have an idea by mid-month, I start working a bit harder to find one. In my sketch books¹, I do have a few ideas in the wings, but nothing sparked my interest, so I started looking through my heavily bookmarked books for some ideas. Looking through Shel Silverstein’s Runny Babbit, I found a short poem, Ploppy Sig Reans His Cloom, that I thought could make a good pop-up.

Design

Shel’s illustration is a pig in a pile of junk. For the pop-up, I could easily make this multiple layers of junk using nested acute v-folds. This is my sixth pop-up of Shel Silverstein’s work. The previous ones are:

• January 2024, Stairway
• July 2020, Strange Wind
• July 2019, Rainbow Thrower
• September 2017, Alphabalance
• May 2017, Runny Mets Guddy

When making these pop-ups, I try to make the illustrations in Shel’s style, if not a close copy of the original. In this case, it is pretty close. Since I have four layers of junk, I needed more than in his illustration, so I added other items that I could think of, including a few references to previous pop-ups.

This mechanism is pretty simple. It is just four identical v-folds nested inside each other. To make things a little more interesting, I used the “cutting parts away” technique on the first three folds. This is where something on the center fold of the mechanism is cut so it doesn’t fold up with the rest of the mechanism. The first layer’s tennis racket (?), the second layer’s chair back, and the pig’s ears all are on the center fold but are cut so they don’t fold.

Four v-folds

You must plan ahead when using this technique. The crease for the fold must not be on the part you don’t want to fold, so you have to cut that part before making the crease. (Many a time I have forgotten that in a sketch). Also, you cannot let the part hang over too far. If it crosses the main fold when the card is closed, it won’t work. You can figure this out with the angles, but I avoid getting too technical here.

Cover

The illustration was copied by hand from Shel’s illustration from Runny Babbit.

Build

• 9” x 6”
• The base was Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb
• The mechanism is on index paper, and illustrated with Faber-Castell Pitt Artist Pens