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The excitement is inevitable!!!! And that’s not a realistic printed pen.

It’s completed!! I screamed internally when I finished pasting every beautifully printed pages together. The end result of the printing are glossy but the brilliance of the colors still stands out completely. The vivid colors wasn’t dull but pleasing to my eyes.The papers I’ve chosen from Fancy Papers Ltd are gampi papers (covers) and thick papers with the texture of my visual journal. The papers works well and maintained its flatness throughout the pasting and logistics.

All these excitement aside, I’ll be guiding you through my zine page by page to give you a full view.

I chose the Jokerman font for my title as I want a memorable font to be the first thing shown into the readers’ eyes. The font shall also give the impression of light-hearted-ness for the entire zine in the beginning as well. Adding the red spiky eclipse to make the cover interesting was decided early before the paper was chosen. Surprisingly the design fits perfectly with gampi’s certificate-like texture.

Throughout the contents, I chose the Huxtable and Hurry Up font for both my narrations and instructions to give them a quirky tone. The two fonts are not linearly aligned which produce a non-serious component for the work.

Originally I wanted to use metal pins to attach the supposedly-leather-made pen holder. Unable to find the suitable pin to fit the colored-paper-made holder, I made a pair of “pins” with yellow color papers and paste the whole thing together. Thinking back the decisions, the pen holder, in my opinion, suited the overall style of the illustrations.

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Initially, I wanted to place a pen-outline subtly in the main pages in the left photo, which will be visible when fully expanded. However, the Pen-as-Arsenals composition made the lines blended too subtly into its background, which unfortunately hidden my initial intentions for the compositions. Inevitable, it’s considered a pity by me. For the compositions in the other side (right), I connected them together with various factors, such as mirroring compositing and connecting backgrounds. With these decision, the pages were held together visually, showing their identities in the same narration, even though their styles were different.

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[Click into the thumbnails to get a full view of each pages.]

As most of the composition are explained, I shall move to the third composition where I wished to included the occupation perspectives I eliminated from the previous project. I was able to revive following the perspective:

A PEN from the point of view of MONK is MEDITATION

A PEN from the point of view of DRUMMER is DRUMSTICK

A PEN from the point of view of PENTURNERS is ART (The main contributor of the page’s interactivity.)

A PEN from the point of view of LAWYER is GUN

A PEN from the point of view of POLITICIAN is WMD (Donald Drumpf inspired?)

A PEN from the point of view of SCIENTIST is CAMERA

(For this I supposed many of you might recognize 2 of the most entertaining engineers/scientist in TV history. I chose them to replace white coats as one of them, Adam Savage once said: “Remember kids, the only difference between Science and screwing around is writing it down.”)

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I left this page to be enlarged as I wanted to point out specifically my mistake on it. Due to my neglect on proofreading, The paragraph in the page had terrible typos and mis-phrasing. While being anxious before submission, I decided to cover it with a plain printing paper as the school’s printing shops didn’t allow me to reprint the words on the extra paper I bought before print. During the class presentation, just as I recapping my pages, I thought of a better solution for this mistake as I mentioned on my presentation:

Adding an interactivity which requires the reader to correct the mis-phrased paragraph, because this page is a tribute to the line: A PEN from the point of view of TEACHER is STICK & CARROT and A WAY TO PASS DOWN OUR WISDOM AND KNOWLEDGE.

Lesson learned, always think through when fixing mistakes, avoid naive and stupid solution as well.

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After the bad news, now for the good news. The back cover surprise turned up very well with the Pen-shaped compilation of PEN in various languages. When the zine is open as the right image with a pen the pen holder, a mirroring composition is formed and I was extremely satisfied with this outcome.

REFLECTION:

My fellow classmates like the illustration very much while Ms.Joy warned me about the consideration on font size. For instance, in the occupation composition, due to the fact that both instruction and narration are typed in the same font size, readers might confuse them over the similar font and take times to differentiate them via capitalization. Overall, the zine was regarded as nicely done. I am proud of it too!

This is the last project of the module Foundation 2D. Throughout the academic years, I’ve learned a lot from my classmates from different semesters and my tutor Ms.Joy. I got to challenged many methods of execution and styles for different themes. This is one of the modules I am glad I didn’t drop and I am looking forward to have the same excitement while being in my majors’ modules.

Thanks 2D, and thanks Ms.Joy for the guidance since 1st semester.

Thanks for reading!!

Since a zine is basically a magazine but smaller…… Is that what the MAGA means….????

(Definitely incorrect, if you did the research.)

Welcome to the end of our 2D journey, which I’ll repeat, the last project will be based on the recent projects we’ve done throughout our foundation year. My concept was officially announced as JOURNEY WITH PEN, a remake of my POV project but expanded and extended. I gotta to say that the whole process is crazy and fun as I’ve never rushed so many digital illustration within a short period of time before! The project reminded me the joy of my own hobby and while whacking the whole work out, I enjoyed every single pages of illustrating. Without further ado, let me lead you through the work, CHRONOLOGICALLY. Let’s start with the good old visual journal, shall we?

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My plan on my zine.

I thought of using 5 A4 papers to form the accordion booklet format I planned as it’s hard to find any paper that has the length to fit the width of 6 A5 papers. (Refer to the booklet figure in the image.) When I started planning the narration for the 8 pages given, I realized that I have the advantages of utilizing the Inside Cover Pages for both ends, because there’s no need to leave them blank for a zine. I’ve figured to give my zine a filling content, why not just include these inside cover pages as the space for my contents? Therefore I added a beginning or prequel to the main narration. This page included my line: A PEN from the point of view of CIVILIZATION is A TOOL OF COMMUNICATION.

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Following the first Inside Cover Page is the main contents of my zine. With the space to extend and expand my previous work, I’ve given myself the opportunity to include many of my eliminated ideas (due to the incoherent concepts. ) into the zine’s body content. During the planning, I found the contents are still lacking some excitement or attraction for the readers. Then an idea popped up as I pictured what if this is a mass publication? I then recalled the book “Wreck This Journal” by Keri Smith, a book series that is an extreme case of interactive books since “Where’s Waldo”. Yes, interactivity was what my zine needed. Thus, I added many instructions in the main content pages that won’t let the readers “wreck” my zine. (Yes, I am not that extreme for this.)

Soon after this, I start designing my zine front and back covers. I decided to keep the front simple to surprise the readers with the rich illustrations. With the same consideration for the back cover, I felt it would be too empty for it because I didn’t included any images in it. So I placed a little surprise for the back cover as well with the help of the glorious Google Translate.

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With a little drafting of my verbal narration and I’m done.

During the group consultation, Ms. Joy and my fellow classmates suggested me to consider more on the printing materials to ensure the bonding of the accordion booklet won’t influence too much on my zine’s final appearance. Thanks to the reliable paper distributor Fancy Papers and the kind people in Poster Connection @ Sunshine Plaza, my zine is completed.

To be continued……

Like, how the heck its inventor came out with a word that sounds so rad and futuristic??

The final project of this semester is a 8-paged ZINE. For me, this sort of looks like a project that requires us to compact everything we’ve learned in 2D into a small book, with the space of trying new stuff as usual. The project enables us to insert any recent projects we did throughout the academic year into the zine. Obviously under the spirit of holy market spoiler, no one is going to just copy and paste their recent work into the zine. Till the time this is composed, I’ve already saw a few of my fellow classmates posting complete research on the ZINE itself. Imagine what they can do by just introducing their title sequence!

Therefore, I’d not like to waste your time and tell you what a zine is. I meant a book with such rad name should have got you google it a while ago. What I’m going to show is the idea I’ve developed for the project. As we are able to insert recent projects into the zine, I was thinking this might be a chance to make use of the composition I left out in my last project, Point of View. The zine is my chance to expand and extend my ideas about the PEN. I view this as an opportunity to make something that’s finally not assignment-based work. (Yasss, this project is damn free to work around.)

My current concept: Create the world’s thinnest narrative book with simple eye-catching illustration style with the tone of children books. What differs this work from the recent project is that the compositions’ orientation are partially altered and the medium of coloring will be shifting to digital coloring as well. Due to it’s narrative nature, I’ll be facing challenges of fluent narration and planning that makes the book worth re-reading. As many of the composition is enlarged, I would like add more interesting element. Not to mentioned I’m now required to add words to the work which made it a typography work, too.

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This time, I’d like to make it more relevant to the public therefore I will be removing the ME elements from the previous project. This decision will leave out many spaces for unused or new compositions, expanding its potential to become a fresh new work itself. With a children book tone in mind, I need to declare that the book was not made for children who haven’t grasp on the concept of an accordion booklet layout, which is the style I am going after. The layout will extend the total length of my zine and potentially resembles the shape of a pen. (The same consideration I did in the teetorum idea.)

Originally I was going after the art direction of Dr. Seuss or the illustrators style I found on previous project. Then I came across this artist which was shared by my high school classmate on social media.

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The artist’s name is Josef Lee and he writes and illustrates what he claimed “Bedtime Stories for Adults. Stories about Life, about Love, about Stuffs.” I have to apologize to Ms. Joy who tried to search “adult bedtime stories” after I described his work without remembering the artist’s name. The mentioned keywords are pretty risky to lead us to unwanted sites. Resume to Josef Lee. Not only the artist’s storytelling is so random yet compels emotionally, the artist changes his illustration style drastically after every work, giving his audience a fresh new look every update. What Josef Lee inspired me is his narrative, illustration styles, and also his willing to change in every new update. This prompts me to include such quality into my zine.

I’m currently pausing in compositing stage, there’s so many to considered before jumping to execution, so please wait patiently for further updates of this Zine project! See you soon and thanks for reading!