Sally Blakemore, Creative Director and owner of Arty Projects Studio, Santa Fe, Ltd., fell in love with pop-up books in 1979 when she found Tor Lokvig, paper-engineer and Jan Pienkowski’s The Haunted House on a book store shelf in Washington, DC. She bought 20 copies and began to take them apart and put them back together. In 1990 she was hired as the art director for White Heat, Ltd., working with Jim Diaz, paper-engineer—Tor Lokvig’s colleague. Sally became great friends with the entire Lokvig family.

Sally has enjoyed traveling the globe designing and manufacturing pop-up books for Simon & Schuster, Disney Press, Viking, The Getty Press, Dutton Children’s Books, Harry Abrams, HarperCollins, Reader’s Digest Children’s Books, to name a few, and many international publishers.

In 2014 she published her own travel memoirs, Human Beings: Ordinary Meetings with Extraordinary People, Balboa Press. She includes stories of the fascinating people she has met while producing paper-engineered books. Art books and hand-cut paper illustrations are now her focus. Her travels in China, since 1990, have inspired her approaches to paper art and moveable books.