Paper on screen is usually a picture of paper: a flat page with a shadow painted on, and print that slides across the sheet as soon as anything moves. This is the other thing. Take hold of a page by its corner and drag, and it lifts, curls the way paper curls, throws its shadow across the page underneath, and falls over when you let go past the middle.
The curl and the peel are geometry rather than pictures of geometry, which is why the artwork stays put on the paper through the whole movement. That holds for a hardcover book, a limp glossy magazine, a strewn pile of wavy sheets and a die-cut sticker coming off its backing alike, along with catalogues, spiral pads, folded maps, menu cards, tickets, receipts and the rest of the paper family.
Pictures come straight from the media library, or from a PDF that is read page by page in your browser and never uploaded anywhere. From there it is a matter of look: page shape from your pictures or a fixed format, paper, boards, binding and backing, then waves, corner curls, peel and pile for the loose models, and light, shadow, camera and background for the scene.
There are two ways out. Freeze any state and drop it on the canvas as a picture with a transparent background, so a curled sheet or a half-peeled sticker can sit inside any design. Or copy one block of HTML that carries its own viewer inside it and runs on any website, with no library, no CDN and no request to anybody else’s server. Everything is computed in your browser.
