Thoughtbubble + Zine

This year I participated in thought bubble as well as actually visiting the festival. 

I really enjoyed the festival itself, I attended on Saturday. It was good being able to talk to people that were out in the field and actually making work. I came away with lots of motivation and with the hope that by next thought bubble I might be halfway to having my own table at least. I learnt that you need to engage with the people on your stall, the people that I spoke to I (mostly) brought stuff off because I learnt things about the way their items were made that made me want to invest (such as two plymouth students that had created most their zines from using a risograph and had used a laser cutter to create their badges). 

For our summer brief we were asked to keep a sketchbook of what we did, I struggled with this exercise because I worked over most of summer and felt like I didn't really do much that was worth drawing about. 

This really slowed down my zine development, I finally picked up on a concept from one sketch (from watching period dramas) and pulled from that. 

As a result I started working on a small western comic named "way out west". I really enjoyed making it and spent a lot of time converting it to digital (as the scans were not coming through strong enough). 

Soon I realised that a lot of my colleagues had finished and with the deadline being so near, it seemed unlikely that I would finish the zine in time for thought bubble. I kept all the images and plan to finish it as a zine for myself at a later date. 

There was nothing else in my book that was worth scanning in, so in a last minute decision I decided to  do it all digitally about nostalgia (something that always happens when I go home at summer). 

I was actually very pleased with the final product, there were numerous problems with printing. Mainly this was me creating the images as RGB rather than Greyscale images so when they printed out they were coming out the wrong colour (and also size). With some help from the technician and other illustrators I finally got it to print at the right size and colour. These went on to be sold at thought bubble. 

If I had had more time, I think I would have probably stuck with "way out west" because I really enjoyed changing my artwork from basic ink to digital drawings. 

I think the whole zine making process was really eye opening for me, I am more comfortable with photoshop and In Design than I thought I was and was able to produce a zine in just over a day (not something I would try again unless for a zine a day project).