Making a 3-D Pop-Up Carousel Book

You can make a 3-D diorama style pop-up that folds and turn it into a carousel book. There are several tutorials on YouTube that show you how but I'll show you how I made mine. 

I really didn't measure this, I just folded and fit it together with half sheets of cardstock weight paper through trial and error, making the top layers about a half inch smaller in width with each layer. So you could make this any size. It's that easy.

First you'll need a background. You can cut one from a magazine, paint your own or print off a scenery from the public domain painting. Use your imagination. It helps if you pick a theme to work with, and a color scheme. You don't have to be a Picasso if you are also using cutouts like I am going to do. Simple is O.K. on the background because it's far away and not the focus anyway.

I'm making hummingbirds for mine and eventually I'll put together four sections into a book that opens 360 degrees, so my pages have to open at least 90 degrees. You can have your pages less open but you will need more pages to make a complete round. I did a little rough sketching to try and figure out where I wanted to put things. I painted the edges of the first two panels and cut out the centers. 

You can glue pieces or paint around the edges of the first two cutout pages to give it dimension when it's open. Technically, nothing actually pops up, but it is still considered a pop-up book because things move when it opens. In this case, the layers move. 

You want the edges to fold over the background sides and you will glue them into place (top layer is the smallest width) so that the pages are a little apart when open and that gives it dimension. I'm using some hummingbird and flower cutouts besides what I will paint on the cardstock pages.

I loosely place the pieces on and I will add more flowers and maybe paint a few to fill in the edges. I cut out a lot of pieces to work with but I also made some graphic sheets in .jpg, .pdf and also as .png images with a transparent background so you could actually pull them into cricket and let cricket cut some out for you if you wanted. You may have to erase some of the light background vines on my prints if you use them in design space.

I taped the layers together just to see how they looked with objects around the edges. I think it will be very pretty. I'll come back and update this page when I get it finished and I'll add more photos then but I was excited to share my ideas this morning. Yeah, I'm a morning person.

You can see the dimension and how it works when put together from the top. Making and putting together four sections when I'm done will give me a complete book. I can't wait to decorate it!

My resource for this book is the Pop Up Channel on YouTube with Duncan Birmingham. You can also learn more about pop-ups and how to make them from Matthew Reinhart who is also a great paper engineer. Even if you don't want to make your own book you can see how the mechanisms are made from these channels and both channels show you the actual books that were printed using all these different mechanisms.

The first section of my pop-up book with a little more decoration.

My finished pages:

Additionally, I just uploaded a set of hummingbird graphics and Mums and Vines graphic sheets to my ETSY page if you're interested in making your own hummingbird book from scratch. I will also have this as a full color printable book for download on ETSY soon. ENJOY!