BALINESE TRIBAL MASK POP UP

I know I barf up plenty of posts that have to do with my schooling but what can I say, it's a full time job. Besides, I treat every art project that I'm assigned as something that I would want to present to a client or art gallery. I invest a ton of time and effort so why not showcase my hard work? Anyways, enough with the disclaimers and on with the show.

In my Graphics Materials and Processes class I was tasked with making a pop up based on a tribal mask from any society that I wanted. Obviously I'm going to do something monster-like and creepy. I just so happen to have quite a few real masks from various cultures from around the world. One of my favorites is my Balinese Rangda, the demon queen. So I decided to base my pop up off of her yet stylize it more my own way.

I had a pretty good idea of how I wanted her to look but I did one of my half and half sketches. This is where I start with the one idea I like on one side and then experiment on the other. I take elements I like from the one side and transport them to the other. Once I drag it into Photoshop I then only have to illustrate one half, duplicate it and then flip it. Work smarter not harder right? The left side in the sketch below is the more traditional version of the demon queen but I really liked the big-ole eye concept. 

Then it was on to the physical creation of this beast. Let me tell you what, making anything in 3-d is a bitch. I actually had to remember how to do geometry, degrees, measurements, angles and shit like that. I mean really? I'm an damn art dork not a math or drafting geek! But I guess all my teachers were right, math sometimes comes in handy. Once I got past all that super awesome fun stuff, I had to wrestle with paper types, cutting methods and gluing. It took 3 prototypes before I got it all perfected. 

I also made the hard back cover for my evil baby. I used a iridescent paper for the cover with colors that related to the mask inside and type that flowed kind of like Balinese script. Notice the band-aid wrapped finger in the animated image below. I damn near cut the edge of my finger off with an exact knife cutting this bad boy out. 

This was hard work but the final piece I'm pretty proud of. I actually inspired my brother and I to try and do a full pop up book. But that, my friends, is another tale.