Zine: The Text Thoughts

Warning: here be words. And more words.

Oof. This was a difficult project for me.

Even though many people have called me a ‘bookworm’ and assume I bury myself in books because of my propensity towards using ‘standard’ English, their assumptions couldn’t be further from the truth. I haven’t read a book (for fun) in years, and even way back in primary school, I wasn’t really one to pick up a book (which caused me a great deal of headache during the ‘silent reading’ periods, because I had no book to read). And I’ve never liked magazines. So to say that I don’t exactly have a great deal of exposure to printed publications would be a massive understatement.

And although I would consider myself primarily a digital artist, the truth is I hadn’t touched a single one of the Adobe Creative Suite apps (except maybe Adobe Acrobat Reader..??) until last semester. I acclimatized myself quickly enough to Photoshop, but by god, do InDesign and Illustrator defy comprehension. 90% of my time spent on this project was just me screaming obscenities to my hapless screen as InDesign sat open and innocently not doing what I wanted it to.

The third challenge that I faced was that I staunchly did not want to create too much new content, instead reusing my old 2D projects. Now this was a problem because my previous projects occupied such a disparity of styles that I was hard-pressed to find some sort of meaningful and comprehensive way to unite them in a single zine. I turned all my works over and over again in my head, trying and failing to find common ground between the works that I actually liked. By the time I began considering just creating new content because of how stuck I was and how limited I felt, a whole week and a half had passed, and I still didn’t even have a concept to start thinking about.

I suppose this was the turning point for me, as I realised (with a sinking sense of resignation) that this was pretty much my thought process through any project: I’ll set myself a lofty goal, suddenly realise how difficult it is to attain, despair for a while and achieve nothing in the mean time, work myself into a frenzy trying to finish the project in time, feel exhausted from my work-frenzy, then submission time rolls in and I’ll feel cautiously optimistic about what I have managed to churn out.

So I considered, once again, which projects I would be happy with using.

Line (sem 1 project 1) was right out, because I hated it. Period. I’m not an abstract artist.

Rhyme (sem 1 project 2) was axed as well, because I felt that almost everyone’s work looked pretty similar.

Ego (sem 1 project 3) made the cut, as it was done entirely in my own style of digital painting, was symbolic and metaphorical, and it had animals.

Typo (sem 2 project 1) was eventually axed, as it had a 3D/4D nature that I felt wouldn’t have translated well into the very formal-looking book I wanted.

POV (sem 2 project 2) made the cut, as I enjoyed the way I’d managed to link each piece to each other in a narrative, as well as the metaphors I’d used.

So armed with the two chosen projects, I wondered about how to link them together. ‘Obviously,’ I thought, ‘it has to be metaphorical’. I sat down with my sketchbook, considering the different symbols I had previously employed and whether they had any commonality in what they represented. One of the most symbolic images I’d used was in Ego: the Pride Monster. Composed of a horse’s head, an eagle’s claws, a lion’s back paws, and seven rattlesnake tails, the Monster was a representation of the terrifying oppressiveness, yet complete impotency, of Pride. Before I knew it, I had some words down on my page:

“Pride
The first sin”

I thought perhaps to use my Ego project animals as icons, underneath which would be a short epithet-style plaque, of maybe the central theme and a small three-word description. This idea worked for maybe five seconds, until it broke down when I couldn’t think of concise three-word summaries of other ideas. Besides which, it began to feel limiting, and my narrative direction felt lost and muddled. Attempting to learn from my previous mistake (which had cost me a whole ten days), I forced myself to not confine myself in this imaginary boundary. Three words thence became nine, and I found I could easily create little triplet ‘poems’ that encompassed both the meaning of the theme, as well as a glimpse at an opposing idea.

As I now had ‘themes and ideas’ rather than images to work with, I got to pairing my POV project pieces to each idea that suited them best. This was a little difficult, as some didn’t fit neatly into the theme, and also because I had 6 POV pieces to 12 Ego pieces, but it was surprisingly easy to just axe the ones that weren’t fitting perfectly into an overall narrative.

Fitting the two together after that was a challenge. The nature of my POV project meant that I had loud, messy visuals that filled an entire canvas trying to coexist with the cleanly isolated subjects from my Ego project. Taking into consideration the hard borders of the POV pieces, I flooded the page with the image so that I wouldn’t have awkward borders hanging around. Keeping in mind the centralised composition common to all my work, I put the Ego ‘plaque’ with the short poem right in the centre of these blown-up pieces.

God, what a mess.

Thankfully, doubling the number of pages and putting the plaque on a facing page (rather than in the POV piece), cleaned that mess right up and saved it from an eternal sentence to Aesthetic Hell. Since I was working with InDesign, I could see the bounding box/guidelines meant to help keep your text neat. I rather enjoyed the way it framed my pages, so I created actual boxes, with a thick-thin stroke to give the impression of a beveled edge (like a real plaque).

Throughout all of this, I knew a few things that I absolutely wanted.

  1. I wanted a formal tone. The paper would either be white, parchment-yellow/brown, or deep leather-brown. No funny business.
  2. I wanted it simple. It would not attempt to be fancy. It would have a clean saddle-stitch/staple bind. Nothing distracting.
  3. It would be solemn. It must feel quiet, serious. Partly the reason for choosing short poems rather than long narratives.
  4. It had to have a narrative. It would be a story, with a beginning, problem, resolution, and ending.

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