"Maurice Sendak!"
For the past few years Matthew Reinhart has been working with legendary children's book creator
Maurice Sendak on a pop-up labor of love! This hilarious book, titled Mommy? is a delightful tour through a spooky house where monsters lurk at every turn.
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 Mommy? is loosely based on the play It's Alive by Arthur Yorinks. Before work began on the book Maurice began to create color sketches of the characters that would fill his pop-up world.
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The character sketches not only help set the mood and tone for the artwork but allow paper engineer Matthew Reinhart to begin to understand how each will move in the book.
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Some of the 2D characters will need special attention as they enter the 3D world of pop-ups. The Mummy will be especially challenging due to all the hanging bandages (no one wants his to get caught or snagged in a scene!)
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 Matthew Reinhart begins the paper engineering process on one of the most complicated scenes, the finale. The story line follows a baby who is lost in a mad scientists lab as it searches for its mommy.
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 In typical Sendak fashion, the baby manages to outwit each pursuer! |
 Unlike a traditional picture book, a pop-up book requires that a great deal more original artwork be created. Maurice Sendak was certainly up to the task creating every single piece of color art including the many gorgeous backgrounds!
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 This is one of the first color prototypes (or dummies) where the original artwork is printed out on heavy card stock and assembled into a working pop-up. Note the word balloon coming from the baby's mouth when the book was to be called Mama?
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 This early color stage allows both Maurice and Matthew to see how well their collaboration is working. So far it looks good to us!
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 The first scene of Mommy? which includes the mad scientist in the side pop-up flap. After so long in the works, we're sure this book's going to be a winner! We'll keep you up to date on it's progress as it moves towards it's autumn 2006 publication from Scholastic Books.
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