Self Publishing 3 , Year 2

Zines

"Zine" is short for fanzine. For all intensive purposes, a zine is a cheaply-made, cheaply-priced publication, often in black and white, which is mass-produced via photocopier and bound with staples. Most zines revolve around a music scene of some sort, but others are dedicated to artwork, poetry, cartoons, editorials and short stories. Because zines do not have any sort of corporate backing, and have a very DIY aesthetic.

Our zines that we created consisted of 5 pages , when we opened the zine the designs got larger until you reached the final piece. I thought this was a good idea as it showed variation instead of creating a book format. On each page we had different tasks to complete which mainly involved manipulating self portraits.

Our first page involved cutting up our student identification image and turning it into something unique , i chose to cut out my eyes as they were very heavy due to me being very tired , i replaced these with lines across my eyes that kind of looked like stitches , this gave my image quite a creepy feeling to it. 

My second task was to draw myself , i dont class myself as a strong illustrator however i gave it a go , i don't think it turned out too bad but i wouldn't say it was a very accurate drawing. however i do like the style that i drew it in , instead of trying to get in mass amounts of detail i tried to capture the key features and shapes within my face. I defiantly prefer creating portraits digitally.

The third page was my favourite , this involved a picture of us with out face smushed against the photo scanner , this was then printed out and stuck into my zine , i liked this task as it looked almost surreal , i also uploaded this image individually to social media which got  a lot of attention due to how unique it came across. i feel it worked well as the high quality scanner really captured detail on my face.

I feel that i struggled with this page the most , mainly because i couldn't think of idea that went well in the amount of time we had. This portrait had to be created in the style of Emojis , we had to cut and stick the emojis in a certain way to create a portrait of ourself. i chose to make a stencil on this sheet of emojis and layer a separate sheet behind to provide the colour however this didn't turn out as good as i hoped and looked rushed and unfinished.

My final task was to create a self portrait out of different weights of dots , this gave a halftone screen/Ben Day dot kind of effect , similar to a pop art / Roy Litchensutein kind of effect. I enjoyed creating my portrait out of this as i felt that it was easy to get across the different shades of colour in a persons face and also enjoyed building different parts together to construct more complex shapes , i feel my final outcome was successful and identifiable as my self portrait.

I feel that overall this zine project opened me up to interpreting different styles of working , something which i would like to try in my later projects this year is a more hands on traditional styles of graphic design such as physically making something before turning it digital.