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.
