Did you hear that?!

Illustration & book design : Nele Palmtag
Text: Rike Drust
Did you hear that?!
– A Chinese-Hollers Fanfold

A fold-out and pop-up book!

»Oh Jesus, get out of my way!«
Yes, you heard him…or did you? In actual fact, nobody in this book is entirely sure what the man in the checkered shirt just said. “I just stole 20k?” “Let me carry this. Yay!“? The hairdresser wants him to sweep her away. The runners think he wouldn’t give up, come what may. Or is he on his way to Norway?

Nele Palmtag and Rike Drust are playing Chinese Hollers – a slightly different version of Chinese Whispers. Across a fanfold booklet measuring more than 3 feet, they have created a hilarious chain of thoughts about what the guy in beginning may have said. The policemen, the street musicians, the kids in the park – everybody has heard something different. When folded out completely, the booklet turns into a bustling street sporting many colorful details. At the end, the Chinese Hollers game goes back to where it started – and culminates in a surprising twist. Did you hear that?!

Nele Palmtag: »It was great fun illustrating Rike’s sentences as they jumped from person to person! I had never done a fanfold booklet before. As the action takes place along a single street, the whole thing is like a loop taking us across the cover and back to the first page. Using several dummies, I experimented to find out what style, paper, and technique were best suited to the project. To me, the result was an entirely new format: Starting off with abstract spaces colored with ink in three vibrant colors, I placed them on the light table and did my outlines using pencil first, then a Pitt artist pen. The hollering in the speech bubbles was added digitally in the end.«

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