One Day (ish) Zine

Day trip at the museum

It was really good to have a day out and get some observational drawing done.  I particularly enjoyed drawing the insects, the sea-creatures in their glass jars  and the machines and models at the museum.  The images are all in my sketchbook.  It was a good chance to generate some black and white images for my portfolio.  My group for producing the Zine were James, Izzey, Kerri, Toby and myself.  Once we had got back to the studio, we quickly worked out when we looked at our sketchbooks that we had concentrated on different things, so it was easy to divide our work into natural history, birds, culture, decoration and machines.  We each played to our strengths.

I used a dip-pen to produce a finished drawing, which I've never used for a finished illustration before, but will do again because I liked the lively feeling it gave the line (Must look at more Quentin Blake work).  I used a separate layer of charcoal to give tonal depth underneath.  I have been looking at Shaun Tan’s the arrival, and really love the way he makes those soft images.  I scanned the images together onto A4 Landscape in preparation for getting a Zine together.  I think I made my images too little, and could have used some more interesting cropping to make it more dynamic.

We knew that we would have to move fairly fast and make some quick decisions to get the Zine produced on the photocopier.  Once we had all adjusted our images and had fair prints, we laid them all out and after some re-shuffling we had a running order.  We worked as a team to cut and paste them together into a dummy book and then made decisions about paper.  I really enjoyed working with this team. 

In true Zine  tradition (according to “Whacha Mean, Whats a Zine?) we scrounged some cream paper.  As our look and artwork was quite traditional, we wanted a more ‘antique’ finish with sepia printing on cream.  Photocopying it was less stressful than it could have been (although the paper did cause the copier on the 1st floor some problems).  We had put our texts together to make a front page, but when it was held up against the others, it didn’t reflect the content of the Zine, so we decided to re-do the cover (and elected Toby as the scribe) with our own images to give a sort of ‘limited edition’ .

This is another project that could be done on an A4 printer (ie at home) and could be produced fairly cheaply.  There is a long tradition of chapbooks , and some of the contemporary ones look really attractive.  I can imagine having a personal project like this.  I also liked some of the ideas from the book like having fold-out covers or posters.