Movable zine, part 6
I made some mistakes saving last month’s update so the version that got to your inbox had some weird edits and repeated paragraphs. I’m sorry about that. Click here for the edited version.
Characters
Now that I’m more comfortable with a workflow that mixes paper engineering and graphics, I decided to put some thought into the characters. For this zine, I want to tell a wordless story of two animal friends and I landed on these two animals that have been appearing in my drawings for a while.
Here are is the magpie (possibly wearing a blue bird mask) from a 2020 drawing on wood and a possum from the same series:
I wrote a bit about my appreciation for the North American Opossum on the post for the drawing above (prehensile tails, the only marsupial north of Mexico, thumbs on their hind legs, resistant to snake venom!) but I haven’t said much about the magpie. Magpies are corvids and hence extremely cool birds, the yellow-billed magpie in particular is native to California, where I live, and has some really striking colors (there may even be an argument for making it the state bird). Magpies are considered symbols of good luck and fortune in east Asia and, well, they just seem to be at that intersection of playful, curious and mysterious I really enjoy.
Just look at this image from Wikipedia (I wonder what that deer was thinking):
Here is an initial sketch where I exaggerate the yellow markings around the eyes a little bit and play with giving the bird a more cartoony eye:
And here are some pencil sketches where I was trying to get used to the characters by putting weird hats on them (I loosely applied some watercolors after the fact):
And here is the digital version of the bird I ended up placing on the first spread:
I took advantage of the “scenery flats” (as Paul Jackson likes to call this technique) on the sides of the tree to place the animals, with the magpie a bit off-center:
The Second spread
The inspiration for the second scene was this movement I saw on The Elements of Pop-Up book called “opposing angles with a tent”. I found the twisting motion of the circle particularly attractive:
My first step was to figure out the geometry. Here is the flat view before cutting (blue lines are scores):
From making this prototype I learned that gluing the moving parts onto the page was very difficult so I added some slits to make the process easier. The final cut file looks like this:
The circular motion made me think the two animals would be moving in circles around the center so my first pass at the art had an abstract design with leaves and an eye:
It felt a little ungrounded so after sleeping on it I felt the spiral and the colors I was using looked very much like a sunflower. So I drew a sunflower with its classic spiral pattern on the center and added some petals in a spiral around the page to complement the motion of the pop-up:
The hole adds a lot of dimension to the center of the flower and I was very happy with the playful attitude of the characters here. I think possum and magpie will be excellent friends in the future.
Thank you as always for following along!
Federico.
:)