Zine: Questions to ask yourself, part 2
More questions with no real answers. This is part 2, with a different style of questions. You may also want to see part 1.
Copies of this zine are available in my Etsy shop.
Zine: Questions to ask yourself, part 1
Some questions with no real answers, but maybe they offer some introspection. You may also want to see part 2.
Copies of this zine are available in my Etsy shop.
Shifting through disciplines
I started watching Abstract: The Art of Design on Netflix. It's a documentary series where each episode focuses on one designer and a different kind of design.
One episode is about Neri Oxman, a professor at MIT Media Lab. She leads a research team in exploring materials informed by nature. (Think: a strong plastic-like material made from proteins found in milk.)
In the episode, she talks about the relationship between art, science, engineering, and design. Usually, we think of them as four separate areas. You work in one domain but not the others. But Neri says, what if, instead, we thought of them as a circle? As a clock, where we shift from one discipline to another over time. Input from one domain becomes the output of another.
Neri uses architecture, design, engineering, and biology in her work, so it makes sense that she talks about interdisciplinary work.
A diagram displays on the screen at this point of the episode, and I paused it to draw it myself. When I see a diagram that clicks for me, I love recreating it as my way of learning.
Here's the circle, with the disciplines each having their own domain, but now connected.
I'm paraphrasing the explanation from the documentary:
Art is for expression. It looks at cultural behavior, which leads to questioning presumptions about the world. These questions lead into science.
Science is for exploration. We gain information (input from art) and turn it into knowledge (output to engineering).
Engineering is for invention. It takes knowledge and turns it into utility for design.
Design is for communication. We take utility, give it context, and turn it into cultural behavior (which is then expressed as art).
Full circle.
Continuing with the clock analogy, Neri says that at the midnight position, that's where art meets science, where Picasso meets Einstein.
I love this model because it shows the value of these disciplines working together. Rather than limit work to one domain, you can shift through domains (with a team...no one is an expert in all four areas) to create a full understanding, exploration, use, and expression.
Zine: The Danger Zone
I have some sample fountain pen inks from The Goulet Pen Company that are colors I would not write with, but they are definitely colors I would draw with. A bright yellow ink reminds me of caution tape, so I created this zine of everyday dangers, with the danger highlighted in yellow on each page.
Color photocopies of this zine are available in my Etsy shop.
Zine: Exploring is learning
I wanted to do a space and sea theme for a while, but I was stuck on the words. And then NASA found water on the moon.
I love how the colors, text, and illustrations came together. If you want to read about my process for this zine, keep scrolling after the images. 🙂
Color photocopies of this zine are available in my Etsy shop.
I started with a white sheet of cardstock and used blue and black stamping inks to build the background colors.
The blue ink is distress oxide ink, so it reacts with water. After the blue and black inks dried on the page, I sprayed the blue area with water and used a clean brush to move the water around and add some texture. Then I let it dry completely. I drew the seaweed and everything else in the blue area with Tombow dual brush pens.
I drew the stars and moon in the black area with a white gel pen.
To create the text, I used a Phomemo thermal printer with sticker paper.
My zine process
A zine about how I make zines. So meta!
Bonus material
Planning
If I don't quite know what I want to write or draw, I plan out the zine on one page, like so:
This acts as a rough draft of my zine, so I can sort out what I want on each page.
Guiding
I like to work on zines with the page unfolded, so I use small sticky notes to label each page, like this:
This lets me work on pages in whatever order I want, without losing track of the order in the folded zine. And, having the page unfolded means I don't have to worry about ink bleeding through to another page.
Zine: After the connection breaks
This is a little story about telepathy...or something like it. Photocopies of this zine are available in my Etsy shop.
Zine: How to spot a time traveler
A handy little zine for how to identify potential time travelers.
Copies of this zine are available in my Etsy shop. This zine is also part of the sci-fi bundle.
To make the background for this zine, I started with white cardstock paper. I used distress oxide inks (3 shades of blue) and blended them on the paper with a sponge applicator. This ink reacts with water, so I used a gear stencil and traced the gear shapes with a brush and plain water. That's what made the sort of ghost-looking gears. I used watercolor brush pens with the stencil to create the darker blue and purple gears. The blue and orange clock faces (most of the cover page and the clock faces on the inside pages) are scrapbook paper that I happened to have and fit perfectly. :)
