Zine // Project 3

Final

zine5zine zine2 zine3 zine4

 

Challenges

I chose to use my Project 3: Ego works for this zine, and all of the pieces were achieved using watercolours on paper. Since the pieces have a hand painted, organic style to them, I found that many ways of arrangement do not work for this; the pages just looked too cluttered. So instead of going for something elaborate and fancy, I decided to go the other way: simple and elegant. With only one (maximum two) pieces per page, I’ve managed to allow the art to stand out against the white background.

Another problem I encountered was the readability of the text bodies in my zine.

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For some reason, it looked great to me in InDesign, but printed out spotted and thin. I thought this was just because my printer is bad, but the good colour printer also showed this result.

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I changed the font opacity and thickness and the problem was quickly solved.

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Final Thoughts

I’m so glad we got the chance to learn some functional skills like using InDesign to make a zine. I never even knew about zines until this project, and this opened up a whole different world for me. So many uses for zines!

I’m also really appreciative of you, Shirley, and my classmates who made lessons super duper fun and happy 🙂 hope to see you guys in the next sem and beyond! 😀

Point of View // Electricity

Electricity from the point of view of ____ is ____.

 

In the previous project, I went with more of a different approach from this project. My artworks didn’t look like they were from the same series. I tried this time to make a series of pieces instead of 6 separate ones, using a running theme of cool tone backgrounds with warm subjects, making the ‘electric’ item in each piece the brightest part, using oranges and reds. Most of my pieces also have scenarios that cannot happen in real life.

1   Paramedics // Resuscitation

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Electricity from the point of view of paramedics is resuscitation; deliver a shock to the heart and pray.

Depicted are the paddles of a defibrillator, a device meant to deliver shocks to a patient’s chest to aid the heart in restarting. The paddles are orange, and as a special touch I added some special tape to the middle of the piece:

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Glow in the dark tape! This stuff is pretty strong and can be visible even in daylight (thanks Shirley for the suggestion!).

 

2    Engineering Student // Syllabus

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Electricity from the point of view of an engineering student is his syllabus; a student holds open his textbook to reveal, instead of study material, images of lightning and bolts of electricity.

I struggled a fair bit with this idea, getting constantly stuck at translating the words into an image. I concentrated too much on thinking out of the box, but finally went with a (to me) cliché book-in-the-hand.

Again, the book stayed blank for a long time, until I thought of making lightning the content of the book, to represent electricity. I tried at first to draw the lightning in with pencil and pen, but it just looked like cracks in plaster. So I used my trusty masking fluid to mask out the shape of lightning, and applied a blotchy wash of blues to mimic the night sky. The result (and peeling off the masking fluid) was highly satisfying. :)

 

3    Electronics // Blood

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Electricity from the point of view of electronics is blood; it is what flows through them, what gives them life.

Without electricity, the electronics would be useless. Here I have painted a broken keyboard with blood flowing out of it, in a rather gory fashion. I considered putting in the lettering onto the keys, but thought that would be too distracting. Quite proud of this one, and it was the first one completed.

 

4    Water // Murder Weapon

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Electricity from the point of view of water is a murder weapon; it may be suicide to the person, but from the water’s perspective it has involuntarily murdered someone.

I’ve used quite a common understanding here, of people sitting in a bathtub with a hairdryer to commit suicide. At first, the gun trigger was not present, and that seemed a little boring. So since the hairdryer is technically a murder weapon, and the added bonus of it looking like a gun, I thought the trigger would be quite fitting (thanks Jeremy!).

 

5    Office Worker // Dead-End Job

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Electricity from the point of view of an office worker is a dead end job; either live through quitting your job or die trying.

Here I’m depicting a white collar worker at wits end, trying to rip out the cable that supplies his work station, his source of meaningless tasks, with electricity (or blood!). The bones show death, representing the endless (well, until death) stream of work coming in.

 

6    Earth Hour // Not Complete Darkness

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Electricity from the point of view of Earth hour is not complete darkness; the meaning of the day is forgotten when the phones are not plugged in.

We get the sense that we are not consuming electricity when we turn off the things in the house that use electricity, but what about our phones and flashlights? Here I’ve painted a figure in complete darkness, but still using their phone. The soft, ambient light casts a glow on their face.

I painted in the first layer of black just with the two light bits left out, but it seemed slightly ambiguous, so I added another layer for the figure to stand out more.

 

Lastly…

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What’s a complete project without the instagram post 🙂

Sweet | Gamer | Crafty | Meticulous

1 // I Am Sweet

Achieved using a mix of colour pencils, permanent marker and watercolour wash.

IMG_0114Started with a watercolour wash and colour pencils – looking good!

picture copy 2Beehive! Looks a little overpowering but we shall continue!

picture-1Wow, the words don’t stand out as much.

20160211_172745 copy 2Looking much better after defining!

2 // I Am A Gamer

Achieved by creating letters in a game called Terraria using blocks of different ‘material’, and then taking a screenshot. Or multiple.

Capture 2016-01-19 14_49_46I love this one – but it’s not A5 🙁

Screen Shot 2016-01-19 at 2.52.33 PMHere’s a better aspect ratio!

Capture 2016-01-19 14_53_11It’s almost daytime!


20160211_172803 copyFinally mounted on some mounting board 🙂

 

3 // I Am Crafty

Achieved by folding and scrunching scrap fabrics into letters and gluing them onto more scrap fabric. I also added some clasps and fasteners to decorate the empty spaces, as well as a bow.

20160214_150731 copy 2The little bow made from some extra scraps 🙂

20160214_150723 copy 2One side of a magnet clasp.

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The wrinkles and folds of the letter ‘I’ are very obvious here. I used one side of a snap fastener for the tittle of the ‘I’ too.

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The final piece! But wait…

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It’s too big ‎(ノಥ益ಥ)ノ ┻━┻

4 // Meticulous

Achieved with 0.05 and 0.1 diameter micron pens on paper. And many many hours. MANY. Hours.

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References from Instagram

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Pencil work for the text!

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And so the end of my Chinese New Year Break begins!

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Many years later, I’ve inked in the text as well as penciled in guides for the ornaments and flourishes 😀

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Finally good LORD and now I am 84 years old. And very OCD.