Hand Painted Zine, Part 1
The first page of a new zine comes to life!
It has been about 2 years since I started using watercolors seriously and the time has come to make a bigger project with them. It's zine time!
I mentioned some of the recent explorations on my sketchbook last month, and I think they can set the tone for what I want the zine to look like. Here is one of those:
I was trying to make spreads with geometric patterns next to more free-form illustrations and they seem like a good way to start mixing the two styles together.
To ease myself into the process I decided to re-create this drawing from my sketchbook, with some changes:
Process:
I decided to print another half letter zine (8.5" x 5.5") but I wanted to paint at a bigger scale so I made the paper 25% bigger (it comes out to 10-5/8" x 6-7/8"). The advantage of doing this is that when I scan the artwork and shrink it for printing the image will look a little tighter which is an old illustrator's trick.
I wanted to have a bigger pattern towards the bottom so I started by plotting this image on the paper using a pen plotter:
Then I sketched the rest of the drawing in pencil by hand:
The video above shows the progression of building the image with successive layers of watercolors, then adding some finer lines and details with colored pencils at the end. Here is a lower resolution GIF for a quicker view:
I'm fairly happy with the final image, it feels weird and personal and it was fun to draw. I particularly enjoyed making the shapes on the steam clouds towards the top:
I'm not entirely sure where the rest of the project is headed but this feels like a good start.
My plan is to make the original watercolors available for purchase, I know the size is a little peculiar but people have expressed interest in those in the past, I'll keep you updated.
I really appreciate all of your support this year, I couldn't have put out all these projects without you and I hope they brought you some joy.
Wishing you all the best for the coming year! ❤️
Federico.