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.