What a Mess! A Pop-Up Misadventure is a bright and colorful pop-up book filled with complex paper engineering and lots of details. The stunning artwork and colorful patterns make every page a delight to look at and the variety of different pop-up techniques is impressive!
What a Mess! tells us the story of a brother and sister who can’t keep their mess under control and eventually find themselves on a misadventure that they will not soon forget. The story starts with a closet, packed full with toys, that explodes. An adventure unfolds with a toy mountain that rapidly grows, funky smelling stuff and a real dust-nado must also be survived. Will they ever get their mess cleaned up? The rhyming form of storytelling makes it fun to read. The inspiration for What a Mess! pop-up book came from Keith’s two children and their ever-growing mess.
This pop-up book is well made and shows some very effective paper animation like a rotating swirl, flipping doors and an explosion of toys. Every pop-up in this book pops-in and out very solid and is very detailed. Combined with the artwork, you’ll see a strong effect of depth on every page that makes it fun to look at the pop-ups from multiple angles.
About the author
Keith Allen is an illustrator, designer and paper engineer who lives in Cleveland, Ohio with his wife and children. He lives a busy life, working as a product designer at American Greetings, and works on his personal projects at night. Keith comes from a creative family and got into the self-publishing world a couple of years ago with the launch of a wonderful pop-up book called A Day in Rehoboth Beach. Keith, his grandmother Joanne DeFiore and his brother Brian Allen created this pop-up book about their favorite summer destination Rehoboth Beach.
We’ve asked Keith Allen some questions about his project What a Mess!. Continue to the interview…
Keith Allen sent us a unique and signed copy of the What a Mess! pop-up book. During the process of designing and creating this pop-up book, Keith has assembled three hand-made prototype books and the one showing in our video review and photo gallery is the very first copy he made.
More adventurous pop-up books
8.2
Wonderful
Our review
This pop-up book is a perfect mix of chaos and beautiful artwork combined with great paper engineering.
