This is my first week working from home because of the coronavirus and I am finding it exceptionally weird and difficult to do so. I have never been good at doing my project work at home due to lack of space and usually do the majority of my work in college, so doing my final project is going to be a challenge. Nevertheless, I have started the project in the same way as I would start any other, with mind maps and research.

I laid out in my proposal and treatment that I aimed to create a zine for the Creative Conscience Conscious Consumption brief, but I was also leaning towards the Climate Crisis brief so I created mind maps for each of them. The more I looked into the Climate Crisis brief, the more I realised it was too ‘in your face’ as it is endorsed by Extinction Rebellion. I agree with their values, but I do not agree with their methods which often negatively affect everyday people who are just trying to get on with their day, such as when they stopped tubes in London from running. My wariness of Extinction Rebellion is why I only created a small mind-map for this brief. Once I have finished the zine for the first brief, I intend to create a standalone illustration for the Creative Conscience Mental Health brief during the last 2 weeks of the term. This will be a mini project and won’t require as much in depth research and development, which is good because as well as doing college work, I also need to continue creating illustrations for my aunt’s book. I am undoubtedly going to be very busy over the next couple of months, which hopefully means that I won’t have time to be down about the whole coronavirus lockdown thing.

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I researched editorial illustration because it is the career path that I am most likely to go down, this is also why I have chosen to create a zine for this project, as it is a form of editorial work. New Scientist is a publication that I would like to create work for someday so I decided to research them further, I would also like to work for Little White Lies and The Guardian, so I intend to research them more later in the project. As well as looking into companies that I would like to work for. I also researched some artists that wills serve as good inspiration for me during the course of the final project, these were Tim McDonagh and the creative duo Good Wives and Warriors, all of which have illustrated for New Scientist in the past.

Now that my primary research is finished and mind-maps are finished, I need to move onto my initial ideas and sketches to go along with them. I’ll also need to work on media testing so that I can figure out which medium would be best to create the zine. This is going to be my focus for the next week. I am a bit worried that by choosing to create a zine I have bitten off more than I can chew because it is going to involve creating multiple illustrations, as well as text, but it feels like natural progression from the front cover and double paged spread I created for LWL during the last project. There’s a chance that my ideas could change over the next few weeks if I end up realising that I have set myself too much work. I hope this doesn’t happen though because I have wanted to create a zine for quite some time and this project is the perfect opportunity to do so. I am most likely going to make the zine in a digital format because I don’t have access to any substantial printing facilities besides my old office printer, which is okay, but it’s nowhere near good enough to print zines.