This week was zine week! I busted ass on the illustrations and stitched the finished draft together in InDesign.
Since I had this assignment due next week instead of this week due to my extension, I was very excited to see what other people had done in class. I made sure to keep an eye out for the amount people were making and the level of work they were putting into it. I want to make sure that my piece is up to par with everyone else’s. I really liked hearing about the sausage dog zine! I also enjoyed looking at another classmate’s well-illustrated, colourful zine; it was very impressive!
I’m slightly intimidated by the level of effort some of my classmates are putting in. I worry that I’m not doing enough but know that I can’t do more.
I did 11 pages: 8 illustrations, 2 cover pages, and 1 recipe page. For the assignment, I needed to have both raster and vector images, so I used photographs on the covers which I then added my drawings on top of. To pull this into the rest of the zine, I included an image I took of some cookies for the baking cookies page. I think it turned out okay.
See all the illustrations below.
I struggled with certain aspects, like keeping the character design consistent (I changed up the eyebrow a few times accidentally) as well as the line quality. Earlier drafts of the illustration had thinner, scragglier lines than later ones. This meant that I had to re-do several of the illustrations to keep the linework consistent.
I also tried different complexity levels of backgrounds and ended up having to simplify a lot of it. I didn’t want the pages to be too cluttered because it’s a comfort zine, not a clutter zine!
I made sure to keep the colour palette consistent and simple. I used four saturated base colours (blue, yellow, pink, and green). These colours were inspired by Risographic printing. For backgrounds and objects, I adjusted the saturation of my base colours.
I collected all the illustrations in InDesign and laid them out so that, when printed, they would be in the correct spot in the booklet (because I’m printing them on double-sided pages). InDesign can be frustrating to work with, but I’ve found that the scale tool helps a lot because I often get annoyed with the manual resizing system.
For the titles on my pages, I chose a font in InDesign that was round (for comfort) and clear enough to read (so that it was accessible to people like me who struggle with reading).
After adding all the text to my illustrations, I got my dearest partner to read over it to check for any spelling or grammatical problems. She especially helped with the recipe page, since it was far too long when I first wrote it. Here’s the finished draft:
I’m excited to show off my zine in class! Next week I’m going to print the zine. Rae said I could print it before class so that will be good because printing is expensive 🙁
-Ollie
