The second exercise in mindfulness my zine would explore is reflection. I had intentionally used darker colours in my previous spread which had the illustration of the diver in order to help fade the colours into the night time theme, I chose this theme because I wanted to emphasize the importance of reflection at the end of the day as it is a useful tool for developing better self-awareness, and it also helps those that struggle to fall asleep.

Spread 6

Self-reflection was very easy for me to illustrate as the clearest example of this, is someone looking at their own reflection, and I really liked the image I produced for this, but I also wanted to illustrate that the sun is going down in the zine, and that these exercises are especially good at the end of the day, so I decided to draw a sunset. I wasn’t a fan of the ink drawing I had produced for this and wanted to create a more silhouetted design as I felt this would tie in nicely with the diver illustration and would help differentiate the style of the reflection pages, with the meditation pages, so I began to redraw my sunset in a way that helped integrate it into the page a lot more, where it isn’t a stand out illustration but just helps set the scene.

I like the overall impact the page has, and I think it flows really well but looking at this I really kick myself for not using the original ink drawing of the person looking in the mirror as in my opinion it is much more interesting. At the time I wanted to match the digital style of the rest of the spread but I sacrificed consistency with the rest of the zine, but more importantly, I sacrificed quality as I don’t think the digital drawing works well enough.

Spread 7

I was really looking forward to working on this spread, I had a good idea of how I wanted to work on it, and based this spread on a buddist quote that reads  “Just as a snake sheds its skin, we must shed our past over and over again”. I really liked the ink drawing I made for this and because I knew there wouldn’t be much text on the page apart from the quote, I wanted to work on a more complicated and polished background.

The background uses a lot of dark colours from my pallet to allow me to add in more detail than previous spreads without compremising the style, the lack of contrast really helps relate this spread to others and the sky would act as a perfect space for the quote to sit as it formed a near golden ratio spiral with the edges of the bushes. This is one of my favorite spreads and there isn’t much to say about it as far as issues go, I would have liked to use more texture in the linework but I wasn’t sure if allowing myself access to a wider range of weights would cause me to work in too much detail. I really like the spreads forms, balance and atmosphere.

Spread 8

This would be the final spread and would act as a guide for reflective meditation for sleep, I didn’t want to give too much advice here as self reflection is very personal and there is no right or wrong way, I would just put in a small comment about thinking through your day from what you had to breakfast to now, recounting conversations and improvements you could make, running through this a handful of times skimming over every activity or encounter can help give one a new perspective and let go of loose ends that may clutter up your mind. The little space that the text filled gave me a lot more space to work with, but instead of using this space for detail like the previous spread I wanted to work in a simple way, to help fit the narrative of resting, but also to tie the zine together as I was starting to use more digital elements with more detail in the past few spreads. The typography and pallet in this spread are the things I wanted to emphasize, this was a goodbye from me the writer, and hopefully  the beginning of a clear mind for the reader.

Initially I planned to use Spread 5 as a meditation chart/calender to introduce practice and routine to the reader as consistency is key, but this idea felt a bit childish and I was worried because of my simple and friendly art style, I would create a children’s book, so instead I opted to use this space to add a more sophisticated and detailed illustration that would appeal to a larger range of audiences. I really liked the landscapes I had produced earlier in the project but I thought they didn’t fit with the style of the zine enough, I wanted to create a friendly character, within a more sophisticated layout, I had the idea of a diver at the bottom of the ocean as not only are images of the sea very calming and associated with white noise for sleep but also fit my pallet really well.

I really liked this image and considered making a print of it, but I knew that my zine was using a square page format, and id either have to spread this across two pages, or I would have to cut down the design to fit the new format. I re drew this image as it is in photoshop, using a rough texture brush to add a bit more grit, as I knew that working with a fine line with the ink texture brush I was using before would lose the analog feel that was consistent across my zine. Unfortunatley I cant find the initial digital drawing as I think I may have left it on a hard drive in Brighton but I managed to find my next iteration where I tried to simplify the background overall, and instead of having 3 layers I used a gradient to show depth.

I really liked this design, I think it fits pretty well into the square format but would like to continue developing the A3 version for my own personal work, I used the landscaping elements I had learned in my previous explorations to create a coral reef type of background and I think this helps frame the composition and ties a lot of the colours together. I wasn’t happy with the colour of the diver and felt that the saturation was too high, so I swapped these for the pallet I was using in my zine.

This design was finished and It fit well with the zine as I had hoped, but I still needed to figure out what to pair it with, because this page is more busy and detailed than the rest of my zine, I knew that visually keeping its complimentary page simple was important as it would help keep the expectations of the reader consistent with what would be on the next few pages. I didn’t have to think much about what to do here and opted for a big green box, this box would be used to explain the transition away from meditation and onto my next exercise in mindfulness, Reflection

When starting to put things together properly I was at home because of COVID, I had taken a step back from the project to focus on my personal project but was now in a position where I did not have the materials to produce more ink drawings as I did not have a scanner this posed a problem for me as I was limited to my initial scans for the entire zine.

Cover Page

I started with the cover page as I had a clear vision of how I wanted it to look that I established in my ink drawing. I took some inspiration from one of my brain dump drawings in my sketchbook in that I personified the brain but instead of drawing the brain like a goofy character, I wanted to keep it as more of an icon. What I mean by this is that a character is made up of a few ideas and may have motives and contradictions, but an icon stands for one thing, rather than being part of a joke about a brain being its own character and doing nothing, this brain is just showing the viewer that it is relaxed, it is simply a relaxed, calm mind.

I decided to include all the main colours from my pallet as I felt that only including ones relevant to the next page would make the overall zine feel a little less congruent, I also put the light day colours on one side, and on the other side where the dark colours, this dark pallet would wrap around the spine to the back of the zine, helping tie the whole design together with more. The linework was also changed to be a mix of black and white, this was because of the range of background colours, when everything was left black, there was not enough contrast. I also changed some of the lines and used changes in colour to keep the composition, as seen by the mountain type form at the bottom of the page, this was partly done out of necessity as I had an ink spill on my original drawings, but also because it helped the design look more sophisticated and balanced, too many lines felt too busy and leaving this as a colour change helped the typography stand out when placed on top of it. The typography was a done by cutting out a few of the letters from my pallet and piecing them together, this process was harder than expected as I had to ensure that the style was consistent. I had no means of creating new ink drawing scans due to my lack of a scanner but opted to add in digital line work as the fine lines in the base as I thought I would likely have to include more digital lines later on in the zine, and rather than these standing out as one-offs I wanted to introduce them early and consistently. key tools I used here in photoshop were the lasso tool, noise tool, colour range selection, and layers. Layers were essential for creating this kind of work and luckily my work in illustrator prepared me for this, I knew that using black and white lines would mean I had to redraw areas where these intersect as there was no other way to have the colour change midline, an example of this is where the top right-hand bubble goes behind the brain.

I knew I would assemble my zine in adobe indesign, but I wanted to design the cover on photoshop as one piece, before doing this too would ensure that the front and back flow into each other with no jitters or misalignments, using a grain texture meant this was a real risk for me as any slight misalignment would cause a tear in the image.

Opening Spread

I knew how I wanted this spread to look based on my previous sketches/practice, however in these tests, I had only done the left-hand page of the spread, and when drawing this image out in ink, I did each page on two pieces of paper, I knew editing these together and making them line up seamlessly would be hard, but knowing I could use some digital linework if needed made this a lot less of a daunting task.

The time away from this project allowed me to see my work with fresh eyes, I really liked the left-hand page’s ink drawing but felt the blend was lazy and the leaf character was positioned weirdly on the page, with very little consistency with the rest of the design, I used a digital ink brush texture to draw a new version of this, I did all this on one photoshop document as it would ensure the drawings lined up, and the line thickness matches the rest of the drawing. The spread would be about how a cluttered mind is not useful for personal growth and so I used the example of plants needing room to grow to illustrate this idea, on one side I drew out lots of plants all cluttering together, I would write about how it’s easy to feel cluttered and to become stressed, but this zine would offer techniques to give you clarity of mind, this feeds into the next page where I show a happy plant with lots of room to grow. This is one of my favorite spreads as it has a really nice flow to the page as well as nice areas of rest to illustrate the point, The colours also work well and although there is a lot of layers of plants on the left, I kept the limited pallet I had decided on previously.

Spread 2

This spread was to illustrate change between a cluttered mind and a calm mind, It is pretty simple but was more of a decorative page rather than an informative one, I planned to include text talking about the benefits that meditation offers as well as other small mindfulness tips to help with a range of issues from a range of ages. I chose this childish style as simple ideas often work best with simple illustrations and a childish, friendly, simple style is very approachable, the innocence that this style provides is a nice calm backdrop for calming information. I had previously drawn the two illustrations of a happy circle and a sad circle with wiggly lines around it below for this page but felt they were too simple and when put as focal points on the page, quickly began to look like unimportant scribbles.

Digitally redrawing this entire spread was difficult stylistically as I had to make sure it would fit with the rest of my zine, I knew these characters would look better with consistent line thickness as they are very clean shapes and I was worried using my ink texture brush would make them look too rough, I used illustrator to draw these characters outlines but tried not to make the curved lines too smooth and perfect as I didn’t want the overall effect to be calculated in a way that ink cant be. I then took these vector line drawings into photoshop to add ink texture, this texture was taken from a few of the photos I had taken of the calligraphy workshop, I knew introducing this texture would help the image relate to the rest of the zine even though I wasn’t sure if I would use this texture again. I used a gradient in this spread as it added a bit more flare to the pages and helped introduce the colours change that I planned for the zine. I think I adapted quite well to the task of working without the proper equipment and managed to produce something that fit my zine despite having to work purely digitally.

Spread 3

For this spread, I felt like I knew what I wanted but I was really unsure of how, I knew I wanted the meditation person as seen in the first scan, but I didn’t consider how I would edit this to add colour, when I drew it. When I started to edit the meditation character I tried to use blending options to colour in each of the items of clothing, but without an outline, the character looked very strange as the dark hands were just floating. I had to outline this character digitally, and then on a layer underneath, I had add in blocks of colour, that had a blending option linking them to the original base layer which was the scan. This edit was tricky as I hadn’t done a project on photoshop before this but because I had worked with blending options on the previous spread, I knew what I wanted to do was possible, Im sure there is an easier way to do this with clipping masks but I wanted to play with photoshop without the aid of tutorials as I’ve found that is the best way for me to remember for the future.

This spread was very hard for me as the images took a lot of editing to colour, but also because this would be a more information-heavy page, I needed to ensure I had enough free space to add in the text afterward, the spread was a beginners guide to meditation, and the left page would talk about getting comfortable, observing your surroundings, and resting your eyes, and the page on the right would describe breathing techniques and how to have a focal point to return to when you feel you are getting distracted. I liked these illustrations and initially, I got carried away adding plant life inspired marks in the corners, this worked well without text but it took up a lot of space and felt quite intrusive on the page. I also changed the colours and strengthened the gradient, I wanted to keep the decoration and non-essential imagery simple as I didn’t want to distract from the information and the whole project, this spread especially, really felt like I was learning how to reign myself in; stopping myself from dominating the page with illustrations.

Spread 4

I continued my meditation walkthrough on this spread but I began to realise that I didn’t have enough ink drawings to fill the pages, I had based my checklist of drawings off the thumbnail sketches and rough page sketches I had done, but because these drawings were a lot smaller and rougher than the final pages I would end up with a lot more empty space than I would have liked, I decided to continue using digital texture brushes to add more visual elements to the page but because I hadn’t allowed myself enough time to plan and properly work on this page, I was not happy with the result.

I had a lot more of a fluid vision of this spread, I think it looks too cluttered and the grey I used for the cloud doesn’t fit in with the rest of the design. Weirdly I cannot find the finished version of this spread on my hard drive but I found this near-finished version which is much lower resolution, without any noise or texture, overlayed, and with one white blob on the bottom left that had not been coloured yet. All that aside, this design is my weakest, the pallet fit, the line weight is all over the place, and the composition is confusing, I also allowed myself space to write but this space overlaps the middle of the page where the binding would be, I’m very disappointed with myself that I didn’t manage to produce anything of value here and if I had more time I would have definitely focused on improving this.

After creating and scanning an entire a3 sketchbook worth of drawings, I compiled all the drawings into smaller documents that I planned to use as pallets, this would make it a lot easier to find drawings and gave me a way of unifying the size of each drawing to make sense in the context of one another.

With my images and type done, it was time to finalize my colour pallet based on my sketchbook work, I knew that my pallet would be very broad, but have categories within it, so that as the day changes there are the same amount of colours that each fill the same role, but the colour that plays the role will change. I wasn’t sure on what these categories would be and planned to figure this out while image-making, but I did create the overall pallet, ready to use in the digital editing and drawing.

While drawing out all of my assets, I took breaks to just express myself and play with ideas I had outside of the project, here are a few of the drawings I really liked.

I was finally able to get started, I consulted my list and began to tick off the elements, as well as experimenting in between to create new ideas, new marks, and additional flurries that I was planning on using to fill dead space.

I had been trying to articulate what I was doing for a long time at this point, and I finally had a lot of clarity as far as what I wanted the end product to be, but the same way I broke down the meditation steps, I wanted to break down the entire zine. The plan I had made previously was very rough so I wanted to redraw this with some new ideas, based on the text I had been quietly writing during the project, weirdly I hadn’t mentioned this in my sketchbook but I had a few pages of text that I had been writing experimenting with different tones of the language, different ways of breaking down the lessons into steps, as well as different page orders.

As well as numbering the rough content I had written, I also wrote out a checklist of imagery corresponding to the written content, this was because I knew the way I was working was going to be very rough, wild, automatic and loose and I was worried that this rough process would be confusing to compose once I had drawn out all my images, this checklist would organize this process making it much easier for me to put the images together digitally, it would also make it much easier to know if I have done enough illustrations as otherwise, I could end up running out of drawings halfway through assembling the zine, and going back to drawing once I was already assembling would slow down my workflow a lot.

Further Digital Experimentation

I was getting to the stage where I would draw out all my assets ready for editing, but to make sure I was able to edit the images that I scanned in an effective way, I decided to have a play in photoshop by using a few of the tools I had learned in my previous digital experimentation. I drew out a few rough images using the same materials I planned for my final drawings and began to edit

Above are the scans of the drawings I made to experiment with, these scans were edited slightly to increase the contrast and remove any dirt or noise that was on the scanner.

I don’t like this as it is not an actual piece of design or illustration, but I made it to experiment with ways of mixing colour, thick ink lines, and texture, the key tools I used to make this was in the hue saturation adjustment options, I used to colorize, I also played with opacity, posterizing, and blending options, The image blue ink in the background was just one of the photos I took during the calligraphy workshop with my phone, I wanted to see how the individual components would look when rescaled and re-coloured against each other to determine how free I could be with my editing without losing the clean and calming aesthetic I was aiming for.

The image above was more accurate to what I would be aiming for in my zine, the mark-making of a calligraphy brush, the texture of ink, but framed in a clean digital way. I really liked the cleanliness of it and how using white for the drawing complimented the colour a lot, but I was also a little bit worried that the effect might not work so well, scaled-down with more visual elements.

For this experiment I tried to answer the questions the previous image posed, by rescaling scans from different drawings and placing them against each other, I also wanted to see if instead of using black and white lines, what coloured effect coloured lines would create, I liked this but felt that the pallet I had chosen would become a bit messy as it might not be obvious what is going on in the zine if the lines are changing with no fill colours. I remembered how the noise added a bit more texture to my landscape experimentations and tried to use that her, this was something I really liked as it helped add texture to an otherwise very flat image.

Using what I had learnt here I decided to have a practice run at editing a more complete page in my zine. I drew a more finished introduction page and because this was only a test piece I took a photo of it, rather than scanning, I then drew out some the type I planned on using, and because I was digitally editing, I did this in fragments as seen below.

The results of the experimentation can be seen below

Although This was rough I really liked the aesthetic I was developing, I printed these images off at a few different sizes to see how the weight of the line would look outside of the computer, and I was really happy with the effect I got, it was simple, charming and friendly, it also matched the subject matter well as it had a calming feel to it. The colorized typography was the star of the show for me here as I was still not sure how it would look but the slight texture variation really helps bring all the elements together

I knew how I wanted to make the images, and what the information I would be conveying was, but I hadn’t planned any structure yet, knowing the structure and order of my zine was very important as not only did it have to be organized in a way that’s visually appealing, but it also had to convey information effectively. I drew out some thumbnail sketches based on rough ideas I had and sketches I made on a few sheets of newsprint, unfortunately. (unfortunately, these important initial ink drawings are in my house in Brighton and due to COVID I had to leave my house to go to my parents n Peterborough, I would have liked to show these as they are very important but I didn’t manage to photograph them at the time.)

The landscapes I had worked on previously to develop my photoshop skills played a pretty big role in the composition of my pages, I really liked the calm atmosphere they had and wanted to carry this forward, I also wanted to use my pallet as a narrative tool and I thought of a way to use this effectively. My first few pages, the introduction and meditation explanation spreads, would be done In a light green and bright cream pallet, with some bright blues mixed in, this was based on the colors of a sunrise over a natural landscape. I would then gradually darken the colours to deep blues, turquoise, greens and warmer reds to reflect the afternoon and evening, these reds would get deeper as the sun goes down and turn to dark blues and purples. I really liked this pallet change as the start of the zine talks about things you can do anytime, but towards the end it focuses on reflecting on your day and techniques to help one sleep.

The sketches on news print I mentioned before contained a lot of the elements you see in the thumbnail sketches but for example on the first thumbnail spread, i use lots of leaves in a composition, but all I had drawn was one or two leaf forms, I crafted these thumbnail sketches based on the style that was developing in my news print exploration pages, rather than the actual images on them.

I liked the blobs of color I had experimented with right at the start of the project when I considered using overprinting and thought about using this to make my images more interesting but I was also worried that in the more busy pages and spreads these blobs would cause the zine to look too cluttered, I wanted to draw out one of the thumbnail sketches from my plan with a brush to see how it would look at the scale I was thinking about working in at the time, I really liked this image and didn’t feel that I wanted to change much compositionally although I wasn’t a fan of the colours or the type as the black “hi” looked too dominating in my opinion.

I think its useful to take a step back and be critical of what I am working on, so I looked back on what I was doing and why and posed myself a few questions, these questions were not roadblocks, but I wanted to make sure I didn’t forget to consider them while polishing my work. The main concern of mine was that the scratchy lines were satisfying zoomed in, but did they look nice when they are smaller, I also didn’t want to use lines that were too thick otherwise the page might feel too dense. On the left hand page there is also some experimentation with pallet relating to my plan to change it representing times of day, I was only using the markers that I had so the colors weren’t exactly what I wanted but where I wanted a dark blue, I had to work with what I had in my pen collection. The page on the right was a drawing I did to play with line thickness and experiment with dry brushing in a way that only affects the edges of the marks, this is seen on the eyes of the face and although it’s very simple there is something very charming about this drawing and I don’t want to forget about it as I know it would bring a lot to a future project.

I knew the order of the pages and the information roughly but I wanted to break down the information for the first section of the zine into smaller chunks, this would allow me to more effectively illustrate each stage as I was worried that if I did not do this the illustrations would serve no purpose other than decoration.

I had a crit with Paul at this time and it was very useful as it was the first time since before the project had started where I was in a crit with enough work to use other people’s projects to help reflect on my own work. The feedback I got was pretty positive, the thickness and almost iconographic drawings were well-liked by the group as was the typography, Paul also said that I could decorate as well as informing through my imagery and this was a relief as I struggled to articulate the nuances of the methods used through illustration and could only show more broad descriptions and explanations, I think this skill will improve as I grow as an illustrator and hopefully I will be able to draw a sentence as I would say it one day.

The phrases “Room to breathe” and “Room to grow” kept popping up whenever I was researching, thinking or talking about meditation and mindfulness so I wanted to include it as it is one of the important things that mental clutter limits, having space in your day and in your mind to grow as a person is very important and I think mentioning it visually by using a happy plant, helps develop an understanding that space is needed and having space should be a goal for everyone.

The calligraphy workshop gave me a lot of ideas on how to progress and I kept this momentum moving in my sketchbook by buying ink and a brush to loosely start practicing and working on imagery with this method.

I realised that although these thick marks look great, the form factor I used for my zine would greatly affect the visible detail and impact of this imagery. I began to write a pros and cons list with the aim of organizing my thinking and this was pretty useful. I considered making a publication with only a few pages but having them be really big, I was thinking along the lines of a newspaper or a large fold-out city map, I thought to work large would offer me a lot more space to work with and this was important as I didn’t want my pages to be cluttered, the issue with this is that if I did work on something large, the lack of pages might make it feel flimsy and would cause it to be easily damaged while thinking about what’s most convenient as a consumer I was also considering how a smaller document would be more portable, could be done as a hand out which would work well as the subject matter is something id like to spread to as many people as possible. I knew that having more pages would increase the structural strength of the publication and this would be important if it were used as a hand out. My target audience was young people between around 12 and 35 which is a wide range but my thinking was that learning meditation before life gets stressful and before any disabilities or difficulties become prevalent, would help prepare a young person for growing up, and the people that I think need to slow down their minds the most are in the young adult age range of around 18-35. Although I would have liked to work on something for all ages, to appeal to younger audiences I have to work in a certain way that I felt someone who is over 35 might find distractingly childish. The age range I chose educated the decisions on form factor a lot as something big and childish would be even more off-putting to the older members of my audience, as it would be too bold and simple, but if i took the simple forms and shrunk them slightly, they would appear neater and I could organize my work in a more sophisticated way to appeal to both audiences.

My thinking was educated by the works of an animation duo made up of Vladimir Meln and Syrina Hartje, these two artists are known as Animationseries 2000 and the work of theirs that inspired me was their project “Jazz Mags” which are a collection of posters with a satirical take on porn magazines, two of these can be seen below.

The illustrations are very simple but they are organized in a way that feels much more sophisticated, I know a lot of this is from the use of color, accurate satire and consistency within the design, but I think the density of the work along with the layout really helps create a full image, from simple assets. Frank Zappa once said that “Composition is a process whereby elements are organized into structure determined by the composer… If I make a film, that is a composition; It’s a matter of organizing visual elements, behavior elements, textural elements and space and time elements, the same way I would organize notes on a piece of paper” and this is what I think is being done really well in these images, they are organized in an intentional way to make a lot of simple elements form a bigger and more sophisticated design. All this made my next goal to assemble as many assets as I could, and then organize them in a small form factor in a way that was childish enough for younger audiences, but intentional and well designed enough to appeal to the people in their 20s/30s. As someone in my 20s I know that there is a lot of nostalgia surrounding things like Animal Crossing  and Pokemon, these pieces of media have very childish characters but are innocent in a way that appeals to us even as adults, I wanted to harness that innocence in my work as it would help break down the entry barrier of learning to meditate and hopefully make learning less daunting.

Jigglypuff from pokemon (Nintendo original artwork) on left

Animal Crossing illustration on right (also Nintendo original artwork)

After considering all these ideas I continued to expandmy visual library with the calligraphy brush and ink, but I was working in a spiratic way without intention at this point, this was to help me get to grips with the medium a bit more and explore mark making with more ink, less ink, quick marks, slow marks, thin thick and many other variations to my approach, below are the results of this, there are also some comments that display my opinions on some of these varients at the time.

I started to draw in the simple style I was developing with my regular pen but using these calligraphy tools, I really liked the areas where fine light lines sit next to thick darker lines and where the weight of a line changes in a fast and expressive way, you can see this in the clock on the top right of the right-hand page and the bubble in to left of the left-hand page. I was feeling very pleased with this development as it felt like a really good sign of things to come.

While trying to develop my visual style further to match the subject matter of mindfulness, the calligraphy workshop was taking place. I think its exactly what I needed at the time and it helped give me a burst of inspiration, Below are some photographs I took with my phone of the table I was working on (along with a few other students) using sponges, squeegee, brushes and black ink.

Although the outcome was very messy and cluttered I felt that this medium would fit really well with my project as it was simple but had a bit felt more expressive as the angle and speed of mark-making, along with the thickness of ink allowed for a lot of variation and this meant a lot of the words were very expressive. I didn’t want to create something huge and cluttered but instead wanted to focus on smaller areas of the piece, cropping in and using the dry brush affect, small gaps in ink and flowing rhythm that many of the words had. I took some pictures to illustrate this idea so I wouldn’t forget and these are below.

The calligraphy was especially nice as it had a lot more weight and character to regular digital typefaces, I really liked how the forms were smooth but all had slight imperfections, that if were drawn intentionally would not look as effective, there was something very calming and satisfying about many of these marks and I knew this would fit into the project in some way, through imagery or typography. As well as the harsh lines I really liked the textures created when diluting the ink with water, the faded patches with grainy tonal variation interested me and I thought about digitally compositing these textures over the top of an existing drawing. This line of thinking also lead me to consider using ink outlines with digital elements and coloring.

After practicing digital drawing I wanted to start being more specific, on what I was going to use to illustrate the information on meditation, I knew that I was going to create a zine at this point and I knew the rough, playful style that I wanted to use, but I really wanted to lay down a blueprint as my final crit was quickly approaching. I started by trying to plan out each page but quickly realized that the balance of text to image would change the number of pages I needed, and planning out these pages by writing the information and then doing the drawings with a predetermined page number might overcrowd the pages and this was something I really wanted to avoid as a cluttered layout was the opposite of what I wanted to achieve.

In the previous two spreads I was playing with the idea of using a central character, I was focusing more on whether using the main character and a narrative would be helpful for conveying information, rather than the actual visual style of this character. I thought to have one character throughout the zine might tie it all together and offer a friendly face, making the zine more approachable, I also thought about playing with contrasting imagery between the character happy and calm and stressed and clustered, using a person for this would make communicating a lot easier. I realized that emphasizing the importance of a clear mind visually was useful but not essential, as when you have a cluttered mind, it’s obvious to you that it is a bad thing and telling someone who feels cluttered that its bad that they are cluttered would achieve nothing. I was getting quite frustrated at this point as I was so close to knowing what I wanted to create, but I couldn’t find the first step to tying everything together visually and conveying information. This kind of informative work is something I had never really done before so I was constantly tipping the scales from too visual to too informative. Rather than obsessing over this balance I wanted to draw purely visual to allow me to loosen up my approach.

I really like this drawing and I wish it had more of a relation to my project, With hindsight, I could have created a more wacky zine but at the time I had the feedback for my previous project fresh in my mind that was critical of my use of speech bubbles and text boxes to explain the images. Sometimes I construct narratives in my mind that don’t make sense but they still communicate my ideas. That idea is quite hard to explain but I think of drawings like this, If I have something I want to tell you, I can draw it how is, and I can then re-draw this image, replacing everything in the image, with something that means the same thing in one context but have none of the contexts, so it appears abstract but when told what it means, it really makes sense. For example here, I was drawing someone doing nothing, and instead of a person its a brain, because it’s important to keep the brain clear, but how do you show a brain doing nothing. I turn doing nothing into doing something, so the box of nothing is what the brain is doing. This style of working is really good for creating interesting compositions and humourous artwork but without the explanation, it can really struggle to make sense.

For this style of illustration, I take a lot of inspiration from two of the great cartoonists Yogi Kuri and Glen Baxter, who both used obscurity to communicate, Baxter focusing on comedy and Kuri focusing more on obscenity and in some cases tragedy.

“Theory of Evolution” by Yuri Kuri

“Sharing an apartment certainly seemed to make sound fiscal sense” by Glen Baxter

I started to have an unrestricted play with ideas, using the key themes of reflection, restlessness, meditation, and mental clutter as inspiration for the drawings above and below. This was useful as it allowed me to work with a lot less pressure which produced more original ideas. first three pages of the spreads above were images directly trying to respond to these themes, and the first two pages contain images I really liked, I saw something on the right-hand page of the first spread that I really liked and that was the congealed style, where all the images fit together like a puzzle, I imagined colors filling these blocks and even though the drawing was rough and I made it with very little concern for what it looked like, I knew there was something there. So i tried re drawing this image neater as you can see in the left spread above. This image wasn’t what I wanted at all and I stopped halfway through as Id lost all personality and expression that I had been working on developing. I decided that by doing a small amount of experimental drawing and then trying to force an idea out of what I created wasn’t going to work, I had to do a lot more exploration and drawing to allow me a bigger catalog of ideas to choose from, so starting with the page above on the right I worked on some automatic drawing, I was thinking about meditation and clutter but I wasn’t limiting myself to these ideas and was instead just getting a lot off my chest, it was almost an exercise in meditation for me.

I began finding my visual style but before I progressed further I wanted to decide on the form that my project would take, I thought about screen prints but I knew it wouldn’t be the most effective means of printing to raise awareness as the process is relatively slow, the uni had announced that they bought a risograph printer and I was very eager to use that but unfortunately it was not set up at this time, I had to settle for digital printing and because working digitally was now on the cards I wanted to experiment with digital drawing, I have lots of experience with digital art but I have done almost all of it in Illustrator, which is vector based and so often times I find my art being very clean and 2D, I wanted to create 2D, simple imagery so to prevent it becoming too simple I wanted to try using texture brushes.

I hadn’t used photoshop for drawing much at all but I knew the basics in using the brush tool and the lasso tool to construct images. I began to draw using the style in my sketchbook along with the colours I tested earlier, I wasn’t trying to produce something accurate to what the final outcome would be, I was just trying to get to grips with photoshop in the context/style that I would be using later on.

I was happy with this rough drawing and liked the texture brush, I thought the colors were a bit too strong in saturation and darkness, but the main issue was the flatness because I was trying to keep everything simple, playful and childish, I felt that having textured brushes made everything too smooth…

So I matched it by making everything else bumpy, I like this as the noise makes everything feel a lot softer which I felt would compliment my subject matter.

I still didn’t feel confident with photoshop so tried to produce a few landscapes using the lasso tool, this was really useful as it boosted my confidence and the extra practice helped speed up my workflow.

This was the first attempt, all of these practice drawings were very quick but my technical flaws and lack of confidence with the lasso tool is very obvious, I was using layers effectively but didn’t realize you could change the lasso tools mode so the selection didn’t have to be a continuous line, I learned this right at the end of this drawing and it really helped.

This is one of my favorites as it has a strong feeling of freedom, relaxation and a lot of depth to it, I really like the composition as I think that along with the pallet is what makes this so successful. Learning how to use the lasso tool was really useful and it helped me create more believable forms, but now as well as using it to fill areas, i started to use it to delete areas too, this helped a lot with creating grass and a good shape for the mountains as I could carve the shape away as if it were a sculpture.

I didn’t learn anything new here technically but I really liked this pallet and planned to use it for my zine.

I was focusing on sprawling landscapes but I wanted to try and achieve more realistic lighting on a more useful perspective, rather than looking at something from a distance I tried to put myself within the landscape, this was a challenge as every shape had a strong effect on the images believability, rim lighting and adding highlights was the most difficult as I had to ensure I knew where the light was coming from, I discovered clipping masks and blending options here to ensure all my coloring was on top of the foundation “within the lines”. Although it wasn’t useful yet I wanted to take this image and use illustrator to add linework, I was starting to see a very 3d world forming so was interested in seeing if this style of simple shape carving would work well with my standard linework.

This was quick but I really like the effect I achieved, learning in this way was very useful as the quality difference from each of these sketches clearly illustrate, I felt very competent and not limited technically. For me, it’s very harmful to feel limited technically as I can get quite frustrated with myself if I don’t change and develop, and using new tools allows me to discover new ideas and effects that are unintentional and more governed by process than intention.

I had a what but I didn’t have a how or a who, in order to find my medium and audience I wanted to experiment with some drawing, one evening when I was feeling cluttered and frustrated I drew out what I felt, not focusing on what I was drawing but just playing with ideas while trying to communicate how I felt.

I then decided to meditate for 20 minutes and reflect on my day for 10 minutes, this made me feel much less frustrated and distracted, I then began to draw while trying to communicate this.

I really like this spread and it felt like the true start of my project, as before I was constantly flip-flopping on style and content, but this came naturally and everything I drew fit together, I liked the blobby, loose and childish style and wanted to produce imagery that was innocent in a way where it feels childish but conveys information effectively, I didn’t want the style to be off-putting to any age so wanted the tone of my illustrations to be friendly but informative.

Continuation of visual experimentation, I tried to illustrate mental clutter and hyperactivity again, but in a similar style, I also played with colors using the most psychologically calming pallets based on a paper I read about psychology and color theory, I then tried to contrast these colors with reds and yellows as these are associated with danger in nature. I used these colour combos as I heavily considered producing prints based on the cluttered drawings I had made previously, utilizing overprinting to mix colours.

After trying to express my own thoughts and experiences I decided to look at the causes and science behind ADHD as a whole, as well as my form of ADHD which is initiative.

As mentioned on the left is a break down of what causes inventiveness, in simple terms the brain has a call and response system, whereby information on my surroundings triggers a message to be sent to the parietal lobe, once this signal is received it reminds the brain of its long term goal, this means that when a person is distracted, they will get back to the task at hand. The ADHD brain, however, has underdeveloped nerve fibers so no signal is sent and the brain isn’t reminded to stay on track, this leads to the person to stay distracted. It was really interesting to learn this information as I often get lost in my own world and then come back to reality and times passed without me knowing, that sensation of time skipping is likely because my brain isn’t reminded to stay on task so just drifts until it finally gets the signal. On the right-hand page, I was just responding to this information as well as trying to visually convey inventiveness. To me, inventiveness is losing time without realizing, feeling spaced out is the easiest way I can explain it and so I used that as a prompt for my illustrations.

Although it doesn’t seem like an important spread, this spread is very significant, it was a self crit in a way where I tried to lay down where I was with my ideas, and what I need to do to develop.

“So far I have struggled to produce imagery as ADHD is very close to my heart and I don’t want to misrepresent people suffering from it. ADHD is a spectrum and because of this it’s hard for me to cover and fully understand every combination of symptoms/points of view, Instead of tackling ADHD as a whole, I will break it down into smaller, more manageable categories.”

After my self crit, I had my first group crit with Nina, she advised me to narrow down on what it was I wanted to look at and simplify my approach, essentially what I had established in my self crit. The group liked my drawings that overlayed images to show the clutter of a hyperactive brain but as I didn’t have much visual work they weren’t sure where I should take the project as far as form and audience. I think narrowing down my ideas would allow me to make more informed decisions about audience, visual style, and the format my final piece would be.

The crit was pretty humourous as many other people chose quite funny subjects, I wrote down some of the quotes that inspired me to create because although my subject matter was serious, I wanted to have fun with it and make it my own, I often use humor as a lightning rod to help me come up with images and characters because if something is funny, you are imagining what it would look like because it’s obscure, but with a bland statement, I tend not to have such a strong image in my head because I already assume I know what the person is trying to say.

“What aspect of beans do you want to inform people about”

“What about beans?”

Based on the feedback I was getting and the deadline of 3 days to narrow down my ideas I panicked and wanted to change my idea completely. I thought about bread and metal but realized that the research I was doing interested me and I wanted to work on something constructive, so there’s no real reason to change, I just had to find my niche. I started to draw more of my hyperactive, cluttered drawings about a range of ideas, I would write a word down,  then draw every one of the initial thoughts I had based on the word, these initial thoughts would all hit me at once so drawing them at once was entertaining. Often people have an internal monologue, I do generally but when I have a wave of thoughts they all hit me at once, and there is no monolog, instead, I feel as if I’m looking at lots of computer screens all with an image on them. Expressing my thoughts in the way they appear to me felt very satisfying.

After exploring hyperactivity I decided to focus on mental clutter. Rather than using this brief to educate people about a specific learning difficulty, I thought it would be better to offer solutions that are more versatile and can help people who suffer from a range of disabilities and issues. I have used meditation and mindfulness as a tool to clear my mind of mental clutter and as someone who suffers from ADHD, it has helped me slow down and find clarity in many areas of my life. Meditation and reflection are two of the key aspects of mindfulness, as meditation can help you calm yourself, giving you space to breathe and reflection can help enable you to make progress, rather than having time fly by, I look at the time I’ve wasted and this helps me recognize patterns in my behavior a lot easier, reflecting on negative thoughts also helps me as rather than having them linger in the back of my mind I can confront them, which enables me to move on and leave them behind.

I started to research meditation more in-depth, I used a range of sources, Headspace has a lot of good information on their website. This writing was more for me to reflect on what I had learned rather than a final piece of information/instruction. I then started to draw based on the breath, as for me the breath is the most important tool for learning to meditate and if I could illustrate that, I knew I would be able to produce a proper and informative product.

The satisfaction I got from documenting my clean and messy room inspired me to create some form of informative piece geared towards raising awareness of the symptoms and struggles that ADHD causes, as well as to offer solutions for those with ADHD/ADD, and those that may know someone who has them.

I started out by writing down what I wish people knew, things that are personal struggles as well as external struggles. I have ADHD-PI which is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder but is primarily the inattentive symptoms (hence the PI).

What I wish people knew is the speed that life feels like its moving at, as well as the separation between days, because I struggle to commit to tasks long term each day feels completely new, I also wish people knew about the impulsivity that ADHD brings. I often get categorized as a lazy person but usually, I’m just stuck inside my head and this stigma really affected me for the first 19 years of my life because I thought I was just bad at things. I would want to do something, id try to do it, and nothing would get done, so I started to develop self-hatred and a lot of self-doubts, this undermines you especially when all your behavior helps confirm it to yourself and to others.

I knew that ADHD displayed itself in a range of ways so decided to go on Reddit and ask people what they wish other people knew, and there were lots of touching replies, one user said they struggle with sleep as a result of their ADHD so waking up and being productive in the morning is very hard, they work in a group setting and many of their co-workers would have a go at them for being an unproductive zombie in the morning.

Another person spoke about how they struggle to listen and they have suffered socially as people think that they are uninterested but really their thoughts are so loud that it drowns out the person talking to them.

Organization was a common topic as many people, myself included, struggle to plan ahead, stick to a time table and feel like getting anything done is a mad scramble where half the battle is actually staying on task.

I recognized that this was all anecdotal evidence so decided to do more factual research

using the NHS’ website as well as the National Institute of Mental Health’s website I began to look into key symptoms as well as the different types of ADHD

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd/

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder-adhd/index.shtml

As you can see above I started trying to visually communicate these symptoms by doodling my thoughts as they came to me, I still felt like I was in danger of only representing my personal experiences so wanted to draw all these out in one session so I could let go of those ideas.

Hyper activity layered thoughts, too much information to understand anything, thinking about apples.

Sometimes I feel crazy, I get moments in the conversation where I lose my focus and start to daydream, then suddenly everyone’s staring at me and I don’t know why, it causes slight anxiety and makes me feel like I’ve jumped in time, I tried to communicate this in the two pages above.

I drew this on a day where I was very inattentive, I didn’t try to but I kept drawing the same line, I sat and allowed myself to be distracted, and made a mark whenever I was able to focus on the task at hand. The repetition of the same line is pretty telling because amongst the stopping and starting I often get caught in a loop of reading, doing, or thinking the same thing over and over.

On the left is a kind of mental self-portrait, the silver is where I felt pressure/ frustration building and the purple is this burst of thoughts and distractions that cloud my focus. The drawing on the right is how it feels to try and stay on task while these thoughts are pulling me up, I’m trying to grab on to something to stay focused but there is nothing holding my attention and the distractive forces whisk me away into a world of my own.

On the left are 2 short comic ideas I had, time standing still, and nothing happening while I’m off medication and the meds just fixing it. I know I’ve mentioned medication twice now in passing but starting to take meds as an adult blew my mind as I always felt incompetent and suddenly I was able to organize and arrange my thoughts in a way that allowed me to do something. The comic underneath is about something I mentioned earlier where someone will be talking to me and I will be lost in my head, realize that I’m distracted, try to focus on what they are saying again and suddenly I’m thrust into social disorientation where I don’t know what they’ve said or how long they’ve been talking.

The page on the right is an exchange I had with a teacher as a kid, it always haunted me because it made me feel really incompetent, a teacher called me out while I was daydreaming and asked me a question, I couldn’t answer and they said I’m not focusing and that id remember what they were talking about if I cared. This hit hard because I did care, and I was trying my best, but my best wasn’t good enough, and although I’m a pretty bright guy I never seemed to have anything to show for the work that I put into anything academic.

I think this example of a teacher picking on a distracted student is something that almost everyone has experienced but usually, they are voluntarily letting themself be distracted by not trying to focus and because of this its really good at illustrating just how distracted I can be, even when I’m trying my absolute best.

During the briefing for the tell us about it project I was very ill and bed-bound, this illness prevented me from working for about 2 weeks and coming out of it I felt very scattered and out of practice, I had a lot of mental clutter and struggled to stay on task or even start tasks, my flat was a mess and this visualized how I felt inside, so I drew my room in all its messy glory in a simple line drawing, I then tidied up and drew the clean area of my room, this exercise helped me feel a lot calmer gave me a  bit more self-confidence to start the project.

Messy Room

Clean Room

I wasn’t sure what to do the project on, and I hadn’t seen a tutor due to my illness, I was ill for two weeks and towards the end of the last week coronavirus and self-isolation began making headlines, because I had a viral infection and many symptoms of corona I had to self isolate for a further two weeks, so wasn’t able to attend crits or tutorials, this meant a lot of my research and critical development was done at home with no external input. The two drawings above catalyzed the start of the development of my project as visually describing how I felt while mentally cluttered, inattentive and unmedicated, through a visual medium made me feel like I was marking the end of that way of thinking and it freed me of the pressure I put on myself because, despite all those issues, I was producing work, expressing myself and finally chipped a small chunk of work off what felt like a huge dense block of progress I had to make.

I was no longer ill so I could take my medication again, clean my room, organize my life, and start the project properly. Although I liked these drawings I felt like they were jumping into a more finished idea, and I wanted to lay down the research and groundwork so I knew what I was trying to communicate