The final interactive sandwich book, Sandwiches: The Inside Story, completed January 2025, complete with watercolor illustrated cover and bound in a case-bound board binding
Sandwiches: The Inside Story Handmade Pop-Up Interactive Book
The Brief: To create a handmade model for a pop-up and interactive book on sandwiches to test out methods and create a model to pitch to publishers
Role: Illustrator, content producer, and designer responsible for concept, design, and implementation of all lettering and illustration, book text and planning, and final book construction.
Tools Used: Pencil, ink and watercolor on paper, glue, in addition to some digital elements Procreate app, iPad Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, Apple pencil.
This interactive pop-up book on sandwiches is a passion project that I created from 2023-2025. I’ve been interested in sandwiches as a food item, which seems very universal, and I love how localized many sandwiches are to the city, people, and cultures. Sandwiches show our history and bring people together, as they bring ingredients together. They also are a symbol of us and our lives, stacking disparate parts together to make a whole. Plus sandwiches are made of up ingredients that stack together, not unlike the pages of a book, one on top of the other. I am basically hooked.
I spent over a year researching and collecting information on sandwiches, pop-up and paper engineering, and eating a lot of sandwiches in various locations and countries. Some of this research happened during a residency at The Grange in Great Cressingham, England during the summer of 2023. I began by collecting information and trying my hand at some pop-up techniques. Next I whittled down the content and paper engineering methods I wanted to use in the book model and finalized the writing and recipes for the interior of the book. Finally, I was also fortunate enough to continue working on the book again at The Grange in September 2024 to create some pencil white-paper tests of the final pages, as well as complete most of the ink and watercolor final spreads for the book. The last spreads and book construction was finished in early 2025 as a polished model to test out the layout and content, and to help to pitch to publishers.
Listen to some sandwich-inspired tunes in the playlist I created (referenced on the last spread): https://bit.ly/SamWham
Find an article written about the project here:
“Illustrator Jennifer Hines' pop-up book is an ode to sandwiches and cross-cultural exploration,” by Tom May on Creative Boom, 5 March 2025.
The final interactive pop-up book model, featuring handmade illustrations in watercolor and hand-constructed pop-up book parts and interactive flaps and pouches. This gif shows it all working at super-speed!
After finally deciding on the content and interactive elements, I started by making “white paper” spreads to help plan out what parts were needed for the final illustration. These were done during my residency at The Grange in Great Cressingham, England, in summer 2023 and September 2024.
After my week at The Grange in September 2024, I had some actual spreads started and interactive elements created! I chose to do the illustrations by hand using ink and watercolor because it was easier to plan out the cuts, flaps and parts without having to deal with printing specifics.
The first main spread in Sandwiches: The Inside Story pop-up book features two interactive elements: one is a book flap to open like a book to show a dictionary definition, and the other is an accordion fold that opens to show an expanded sandwich illustration.
A spread from Sandwiches: The Inside Story handmade interactive book showing mini-books with ingredients the reader can turn to create their own sandwich fillings.
A spread with openable flaps giving some fun tidbits about sandwiches in this fully hand-illustrated interactive book on sandwiches.
On the famous sandwich spread of the interactive pop-up book Sandwiches: The Inside Story, readers can remove one of 6 different newspaper prints that contain a story, recipe, and illustration inside for each of the noteworthy sandwiches.
Some sandwiches have broken records! A fun pop-up spread from my interactive sandwich book that shows 4 different Guinness Book of Records on sandwiches. Each has a different interactive method or pop-up to explore.
The last pop-up page of my interactive sandwich book, showing a fun hidden tab that reveals itself when opening the spread. There’s also a Spotify playlist of sandwich-inspired tunes (listen at https://bit.ly/SamWham)