Laura Barrett creates an amazing pop-up version of Hans Christian Andersen's classic tale, The Snow Queen

Wow! We are so impressed by Laura Barrett’s amazing pop-up version of Christian Andersen’s classic tale, The Snow Queen. It is a beautiful book which took a huge amount of skill to create so we asked Laura to tell us how the project came about and her approach to the work.

“After creating a self-initiated miniature hand clothbound concertina of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Orchard Books (Hachette) commissioned me to illustrate a larger gift edition of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen.

Working with designer Izzy Jones, I was thrilled to create the format from scratch, complete with a laser cut pop-up castle and Press Out and Play characters. I hope the interactive details will help the story resonate with both children discovering the story for the first time, and adults revisiting the evocative memories from childhood.

I hadn’t read The Snow Queen as a child, so it was a joy to immerse myself into this classic fairytale. I took a lot of inspiration from The Snow Queen‘s original setting of Copenhagen, with the characters journeying through the seasons and north towards Finland and to Spitsbergen, the Northern-most island of the Norwegian Archipelago, where the Snow Queen lives. I’m fascinated by the Northern Lights so it was a pleasure to draw them. I love hiding small elements within my illustrations, so there’s at least one bird to spot on each page!”

The Snow Queen Classic Pop-up and Play (Hardback) is out now and is published by Hachette Children’s Group.