About me

I am a so-called “Paper Engineer” but that’s just a fancy way to say that I like to play with paper and create pop-ups. I credit my work as "PaperPaul" but my real name is Jean-Paul and I'm from the Netherlands. In 2014 my girlfriend Denice and I started a platform about pop-up books named BestPopUpBooks. And after a couple of years, I started making pop-ups myself, just for fun. That was the start of a new hobby. Creating pop-ups is a sweet spot where crafting, illustrating, and engineering meet. I love both the creative and the technical aspects of making pop-ups. My daytime job is graphic and web design. This background also helped me to understand how to make templates and print files.

One of my favorite things to do is to make quick concepts and experiment with mechanisms. I enjoy the challenge to make something work or finding the best solution to make a pop-up work. I also love to work with curves because they add organic shapes to pop-ups that mostly use straight lines (folds) and symmetrical mechanisms.