This exercise was completed out of turn from others. Given I have had mental health struggles I have not completed much personal work in my sketchbook, and the brief was to to create a zine or artist's book using an inspiration from my sketchbook. I put me into a mental block, and gave me a lot of imposter syndrome.
When I managed to get my momentum going again, my tutor gave me useful advice to use my current experience for the exercise brief. I first thought about exploring the mental health aspect, and decided to keep that as an option for my assignment instead.
Part of getting back up to speed was asking for help in my professional community, and I was fortunate enough to spend time with a friend who helped me to explore different business ideas. He suggested that I could draw out some of the ideas that I had. Central to those ideas was a pipe dream I have had to open a games cafe which would be designed to be inclusive and accessible, and provide multi-use space for creativity and self-expression. So I decided to create a small zine based on a manifesto of sorts about why I thought this space needed to exist.
I considered some of the methods to produce the zine and opted for the no-staple option I had used in Illustration Sketchbooks. Rather than work in my sketchbook, I decided to think through the design more practically. I struggled with what I had to say and to distil everything into 6-7 pages. You will see in the video below that I worked and reworked things a lot!
I intended to create an isometric illustration of my pipedream board game cafe on the reverse of the page, as a hidden illustration that could be folded out. I would then finish the zine in a way that looked like it had been created using a risograph printer. However, during the exercise, I re-tore my right rotator cuff, which made doing any drawing extremely painful. So I decided to stop at the roughs stage without doing the secret illustration or making a more finalised work.
To get a sense of how it worked as a zine, I printed out the roughs onto A3, cut and then folded the zine to read through it. You can see a brief run-through of that paper prototype below:
Looking through the zine, I am not sure that I condensed the message well enough - I have so many things to say, but perhaps so much that it's not clear yet. The first few pages have a good balance of words to images, but page three seems too wordy and perhaps slightly confusing. I am trying to make things ambiguous enough to be 'manifesto-y' but really this is all about a board games cafe. On reflection, I think I should lean into that more. The other pages have a decent mix of words to pictures, but I wonder how that will change once I do another editing pass.
Ideally, I would like the rear cover to have less on it; it felt like I didn't have enough space in the main zine. This needs to be looked at in the next edit. I also wonder if I should add an illustration to the front cover. I plan to move on to finish sections four and five of the unit, and then come back to this and other exercises in the run-up to assessment and take them to completion for the sake of my portfolio and giving myself as many realised ideas as possible for the assessment selection.
I will try my best to work on this before that, as I wanted to take the zine and publish it online as part of building up my creative career. It's a statement of intent and putting it into the world is a form of accountability to make my board game cafe happen!
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