Gorgeously Intricate & Hand-Crafted Pop-Up Books by Bozka

I’ve always been fas­ci­nat­ed by the con­struc­tion and engi­neer­ing that goes into pop-up and accor­dion-fold books. So, when I saw Bozena Rydlewska’s (AKA Boz­ka) beau­ti­ful illus­tra­tions in a 3D form, I was wowed by their beau­ty and detail.

I had the oppor­tu­ni­ty to ask Boz­ka a cou­ple of ques­tions about her work. She’s loved pop-up books since child­hood and had always want­ed to make one.

“When I fin­ished my series of illus­tra­tions New Botany [above], I thought it would be inter­est­ing to inter­pret the illus­tra­tions into three-dimen­sion­al forms,” she tells me. “At that point I was real­ly tired of work­ing non-stop on the com­put­er and eager to do some­thing with my hands.”

To make her pop-up books, she did some research. Boz­ka read sev­er­al man­u­als and also attend­ed a week-long pop-up book course at West Dean Col­lege in Eng­land. Um, I want to take one of those. Sign me up!

So, how long did it take to cre­ate these pieces? “It took me 3 to 4 weeks to make each pop-up. It was a com­pli­cat­ed and time con­sum­ing process — I was work­ing on 1:1 scale mod­els, cut­ting and glu­ing over and over again until the pop-up matched the vision I had in my head,” she explains. “The final pieces were print­ed on high qual­i­ty archival paper, cut out by cut­ting plot­ter and assem­bled by hand by myself. The assem­bly of the most com­pli­cat­ed pop-up took 14 hours.”

Total­ly worth the time spent. They’re beautiful!