After the presentation, consultation with Mimi and peer reviews from my classmate last week, I am much more confident in my idea and how I am going to execute the idea! I have finalised the idea of “Save the cats of Yishun!”. I am an animal lover, I believe in animal rights and I hope a lot of people around me do too. When I got the brief to work on Yishun, I was shocked to learn all the dramas behind the cat murders, I can’t believe people are actually crazy enough to do that. Then I think of how and why they would do this.. It must be the way they were brought up! When they were kids, something or someone might have told them that it is “okay” to be mean to animals.. 

THIS HAS TO STOP NOW!

My target audience for this zine will be the children of Yishun and the children who reads this zine. It will not be a storybook, this zine will narrates a story with series of illustrations to help the children visualise the story. Like I said, this will not be a story book, so I went to search for some inspirations to come up with this idea:

These zine ideas are very close to what I am trying to achieve. The first zine (blue and black colors illustrations) is super amazing in terms of minimalism and the choice of colors. Like I have mentioned before I would like to try risograph, so a lot of the inspiration will have a lot to do with colors. The illustrations of the first zine is placed on one side of the spread, and the text is on the other side. There are only 2 colors which is very easy to look at and is not distracting. However, the text of this zine is very hard to read even though the artist is probably trying to portray the handwritten and handmade outlook to this zine but it’s too hard to read.

The second zine (Sad Girls) is also very close to what I am trying to achieve. I think this zine is interesting because it has no text. All of it are series of illustrations of a girl looking sad. Of course this will be easy if my concept of Yishun is about sad people but it’s not. Still, I enjoy the illustrations and the way they are arranged in this zine. The most important scene is on the spread and the others are stand alone.

This third zine strikes me in terms of colors and the abstract imageries in the zine. They are over the top and are super extreme! Which I think will not work in my zine as it is targeted to kids. Even though children react to colors and shapes very much, but too much might not be good.

I think this last zine is exactly what the brief is asking for, 8 pages zine. This zine tells you the whole story on the first page, and follows by the illustrations for the whole story. I think it is aesthetically pleasing but not to kids. They will not want to read a chunk of words and then see the pictures afterwards. They will get intimidated by the amount of text. However, I must say, this last zine help narrow down my zine concept very much, and I would like to move along in this direction.

So I begin my illustration story.. I first came up with the story and illustrated them onto a cutout paper.. what I realised was that I only have 6 pages to illustrate. I got to page number 5 and realised this is a huge failure and WHAT HAVE I DONE!!! So here are the six “failed” first attempt for this project.

The story goes by a bunch of cats sitting around being sabo because of what the people have been doing to them.. Not taking care of them, hurting them and killing them (eventually). The main character cat set out on a journey to look for her missing friend and saw other cats have better lives than her and her friends.. She then found her dead friend by the lake and was attacked by the murderer and it just ends there because I couldn’t illustrate anymore… OH NO!

THESE ARE HORRIBLE…..

So I redid my illustrations and this time I planned SO MUCH MORE and I asked my kids for advice! Who else to ask for advice when I’m doing a zine for children than children themselves?! But before, here are the illustrations I redid:

The cats have no proper home and a lot of them went missing because of the murders.. it is very sad…

So, she went to look for her friends and she went by the KPH hospital and saw her friend, and he was killed by the murder!!! OH NO!!!

She run away from the evil that was chasing her! Passing through the community club (which I need to redraw) and to the Yishun Park where she is save.. She needed to feel safe, and she found peace hiding under a bench.. (the structure at the page on the right is a structure at Yishun Park where people go up to look at the view, I will take a picture of the real one for reference! Sorry!)

A nice kind lady (possibly me.. haha) came for her rescue and took ask her friends to protest and raise awareness to not kill animals especially cats on Yishun!

I will work on the colors ASAP! Here is the reaction video from my children:

As you can see, this video really gets them to talk and imagine about a lot of things, they “kind of” get the story but not fully, I think with colors, and proper text, they will be able to tell the story and understand the situation. The whole killing cat thing does not worry me because from the reactions I got, they care so much more on the story of the cats and how cute they look!