Finally I started on the content of my zine! After the consultation, I went back and think about what are the site specific elements that make up Kent Ridge Park. After looking through the photos that I’ve took so far and doing further research, the elements and the places that I’ve included in my zine are:

1. Kent Ridge Pond (Cover Page)
2. White-breasted Waterhen (2nd&3rd Page)
3. Wildflowers (2nd&3rd Page)
4. Coastline at the Lookout Point (4th&5th Page)
5. ’99 bend’ Road (6th&7th Page)

The title of my zine is Existenature. It’s derived from the word exist and nature. I also thought of the concept of existentialism where in simple terms, humans question their reason of existence. This is when I thought perhaps wildlife, nature or even non-living things may have the same thought as humans where they question their existence in the park. Perhaps the wild flowers do not want to exist in the park or the dragonflies yearn to live in another place. Therefore in my zine, I want to capture the beauty of these elements existing in Kent Ridge Park and acknowledge their existence.

Cover Page

For the cover page, I decided to use a photo of the Kent Ridge Pond and I overlay hexagon pattern over the image. The hexagon pattern used is to portray the vision of a dragonfly. Later,  I edited the image of the Kent Ridge Pond to look like the black light effect. This is because after doing some research, it is known that dragonfly can see uv light so I thought I try to edit my image to a similar effect. So this is the outcome of my cover page:

2nd&3rd Page

These birds are known as White-breasted Waterhen  (Amaurornis phoenicurus). I know in my previous posts I did not mention about them. This was because only on my third visit that I sat near the Dragonfly Pond then I saw their existence. There were quite a number of them. However, it is quite difficult to take photos of them because they scurry away quickly when I approached them. I decided to include a design of them because after doing some research, I found out that bird-watching is a common thing that people do at Kent Ridge Park. Although when I was there I only managed to spot these waterhens and another species of bird which I am not very sure because I couldn’t see clearly.

By using mark making, I created a few impressions of them.

As I’ve mentioned often in my previous posts, the wild flowers there are rather unique so I picked a few of them to create marks with them as shown below:

Later I manipulated these mark makings on photoshop and illustrator to create the following outcome for my 2nd and 3rd page:

4th&5th Page

I mentioned in my previous post that this particular view of the coastline from the lookout point at Kent Ridge Park is unique to the park so I thought it is only appropriate to include this in the zine.

I came up with an illustration to show the different layers leading to the coastline. Later, I layered the photo of the coastline itself on top of my illustration to show a hint of the coastline itself.

6th&7th Page

Lastly, of course I had to add the infamous ’99 bend’ road in my zine. For these pages I added a mark making that I did previously which reminds me of the chills around the bendy road. I then overlay the design on top of the photo of the road I took.

I definitely had fun creating this zine despite the challenges I’ve faced throughout the journey of making this zine. However, there is a sense of accomplishment that comes with the completion of this zine. I may not have created a good one and there are definitely lots of room of improvement but I do hope that I get a chance to create zines again 🙂