I have finally finished my zine, I am really happy with how it has all turned out!

FInal Zine Digital

I have done a test print to see how my zine prints and how it looks all together. I first had to work out the order that they had to be printed so that they were in order when the book closed, this took quite a while to work out how to do, but I did it on indesign. On the test run I found that the card I had brought was really to thick so the zine looked chunky and wont close properly. Also there were to many pages as I had printed one sided so there were plain white pages when putting the book together. This means I have to double side print if I want to create the book. I also found that the images didn’t show up very well on black card even if I made the colours really bright. So I am going to just have white card the whole way through but put black boxes round the images I want to be black as I feel this will create the same feel that  I wanted.

 

I have created a plan for my final zine, as I also really like my fashion illustrations I have come up with the idea to create a colouring book to go along side the zine as well, as they are very popular at the moment. It would be the line drawings plain so that the person receiving the zine could colour them in. I drew out the plan for the zines and colouring book and I have also decided that I’m going to use black and white card to put the book together.

I have been finding it hard to put together my zine, as it looks random and strange. The message and feeling I wanted to create hasn’t worked so I’m thinking of a new way to make my zine. I have come up with the idea of using the first hit David Bowie had ‘Space Oddity’ and the last song he made ‘Lazarth’ to create a sort of poem zine. I have been experimenting with mixing his lyrics up together to create a new story as David Bowie loved to create stories in his work. I used a method that David uses himself where you cut up the lyrics verse by verse and move them to create something new. This was a really enjoyable process and I made a few different outcomes before finally picking which one I wanted to use.

This  is the poem I have chosen to use for my zine. I think it really evokes the feeling that I wanted to create.

Today we looked at different ways to put are book together, we got taught about book binding. There are loads of different ways to bind books but we got taught how to book bind using the straight stitch technique. They gave us some instructions that we followed to make the book.

We created holes with a scalpel and then from using a binding needle sewed the book together using a running stitch. This was quite fiddly and took a few times to get right, but over all was quite an enjoyable process. I think I will use this process to create my zine.

I decided that I wanted to use the heart from my mastheads and strap-line as the front cover of my zine. I thought I would try Laser cutting the heart out to give a peep a boo effect. I arranged an appointment to see the laser cutting expert. Before the appointment we had to scan our images into illustrator on to a template that Chris had made for us. Using this template I had to chose how I wanted my image to be cut there were a few options I could have chose for it all to be cut out or only some of the image or to be engraved or sketched. I wanted to originally get the image cut out but my image wasn’t all joined together so I couldn’t do that. So I decided to get the image engraved on to card. So that meant I had to make the image green.

I then went and had the image cut, I had it cut onto card as that is what I’m having my Zine made out from. Unfortunately it didn’t show up at all on black card so I tried white, It did work but there were some holes where the lines had been drawn together. Even though I wanted to use it for my front cover I had chosen against it, as it doesn’t look very good. So I’m going to just use the scanned image as my front cover. However I did really like the laser cutting machine and now I know how to use it, I will hopefully be using it in the future.

As part of a mini brief we were asked to create collages to put in are zines.

For my first one I used old David Bowie album covers and painted his famous Aladdin Saine hair and lighting bolt on it. I’m not overly happy with the outcome as it looks quite rushed and messy. I don’t want to put this one in my zine.

I then created collages using tracing paper and pen/ pencils. One one of the collages I even used old pastels and tissue paper. After i had drawn on them I scanned them into Photoshop and added colour and strokes onto them. I really like how they turned out and they have an almost Andy Warhol look to them that I love. I’m going to use these collages in my final zine.

I then did collages with a mix of young and old David Bowie to see what that created, the first one was him in the ‘Life on mars’ video and the face was from hero’s album shoot. The other is from a shoot when David was in the 80’s and the face is from the 70s. I really like the first one and think it illustrates that he was an idol and even in the different eras he is still recognisable.

Over the last few weeks we have been going to life drawing lessons on a Wednesday afternoon. In these lessons we have been learning about the different types and styles of fashion illustration, particular drawing techniques and learning how to use a range of mixed media . The first week of the sessions looked at the different types of drawing styles out there such as, blind drawing, peak drawing and line drawing. we also had to try  drawing for different lengths of time from 30 seconds up to 30 minutes

 

After I had drawn the images out on illustrator, I then used Photoshop to colour in the images. This was fun and didn’t take that long to do and I really like the results, I will use these images to create a gif and I want to find another place to put these images as I really like them!