Hand Painted Zine, Part 15
The zine project for this year has been taking a bit longer than I hoped for. I keep on thinking I want the drawings to be casual and fun, and then I spend a ton of time fiddling with them or feeling unsatisfied with my sketches.
This month I decided to re-do one of the warm-up pencil drawings, one of the procrastination projects I talked about before:
I traced the original color pencil drawing on procreate and made the top part a little bit more dynamic:
Then I spent a little too much time re-tracing it in Adobe Fresco as a series of solid shapes that are vector paths. Fresco is pretty decent at making vectors with a brush-like workflow, but honestly, in this case it wasn't worth it:
The whole point of doing this was to transfer the image on watercolor paper using the plotter but time-wise it would have been just as easy to print it, then trace it by hand on a light box, since the vector file I got out of fresco still needed a fair amount of cleanup 🤦 . Plotting the thing is kind of fun though:
I scanned the water coloring progress in 10 minute increments to create this process GIF
I really liked all the texture on the snakes provided by the granulating paints (specifically Sodalite Genuine for the bluish central snake and Imperial Purple for the other one)
I'm about 3 or 4 drawings away from printing this zine so I'm glad to see some progress.
Things I found on the way
There is this pesky thought I keep on having when it comes to engaging in this act of making rough, imperfect images: what's the point?
It has a lot to do with the ease of making images using AI these days. It's getting so easy that sometimes I wonder what's the point of doing it by hand anymore. I don't really have a good answer. And I don't really have a very strong stance around AI other than let's wait and see (and well, honestly I do enjoy coding with AI).
But there is this background ambient despair I feel at times. It actually affects my own enthusiasm for putting pencil on paper, and I don't really know what to do with it.
The closest thing I have to an answer is that drawing is a soothing activity for me, and in that sense the process is just as important as the final result. The drawings below reflect some of that. Lately I've been really enjoying laying down these pencil textures and finishing some of them with watercolors on top. They are simple, rough, and kind of understated. And maybe these are all reactions to the overly saturated gloss of AI images.
Anyway, I wanted to share a few of them:
Other projects
I had some fun making this video about recreating a few of the geometric designs from Hajime Ouchi's book "Japanese Optical and Geometrical Art" using my favorite vector editor.
Some fun animations also came out of these explorations, you know, more procrastination projects 😬
I hope the end of summer is going well for you, and thanks as always for your support!
Federico 😊