This is an amazingly beautiful concertina book that tells a fairy tale through ingenious paper cut-outs and paper engineering, created by Hiroko Matshushita.
The whole piece tells a story without words, using a black and white palette mostly made up of white cut-out shapes and minimal character illustrations. The mirror scene is particularly ingenious, when folded the queen character looks as if she is actually looking through a mirror at her reflection, but it is only a cut out mirror placed so that the illustrations face each other. Its very clever indeed.
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This mirror thing is so clever!
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The illustrations are simple and work with the blank backgrounds created by layered paper and cut outs, and they create depth naturally and make the little scenes come to life.
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This very much feels a one off piece of work but It could be produced on a limited scale quite easily because of the limited colour palette and could be cut out using a cutting machine. It would be highly desirable and as it tells a story in itself it works well as a storybook and a piece of art.
I'm really sold on adding some paper cut-out or layering elements and I might not go as far as this because its highly intensive and would only be good for a very limited production. I also like to sue a lot of colour and I dont think full colour would work as well for something like this.
This example helped to show how you can create a whole narrative with only a few pages on a concertina book and how lovely it can look. I'd love to retell a fairytale in this format!
