I’ve had yet another really productive and, to be honest, stressful week. I’m still finding it so difficult to motivate myself, but I was aiming for a distinction before the world went all topsy turvy and that’s still the grade I would like to get so I’m clinging onto that thought to try and push myself more and more every day.

I’ve managed to get so much work done this week, staying up until around midnight everyday just to get enough work done. I started the week on a bit of a high by adding more layers to the energetic grey background on my advertisement anxiety gouache painting. I really like how it emanates from the woman and focuses the viewer’s attention on the woman in the centre of the design. All it needed after this was text. This was important because it needed to represent all of the advertisements that are causing the woman’s anxiety. I started this by creating various signs and fonts in marker pen so that I could decide which one would work best. I chose to use marker pen for the text, rather than gouache paint because I wanted the text to be bold and stand out against the gouache, rather than get enveloped by it. To figure out which font/sign would be best, I scanned a couple of them onto Photoshop, along with the gouache painting. I then edited them a bit and digitally placed the text over the gouache painting to see if they worked together. The first one didn’t work well, but the 2^nd font looked a lot like scrawling on the wall. I digitally collaged it onto the gouache painting and used it to fill up all of the space around the woman to make it look like she has scrawled the words onto a wall in mental health unit. Or like the words are all she can think about.

I was really happy with how my advertisement anxiety illustration turned out after I had chosen which text to use and edited in Photoshop and decided that it was ready to go into my zine. My next step was to move onto developing and finalising my plastic orca design. To do this, I scanned the watercolour ocean page I painted earlier in the project and digitally placed the plastic orca illustration on top, I then spent some time editing it until I was happy with the design. It took me quite a few attempts to figure out how much text I should include on this design and also what the composition should look like. I tried many different text combinations, including one that looked similar to the scrawling I used on my previous illustration, but it just didn’t work for the orca. But after many attempts, I was finally able to turn it into a design that I was happy with. Initially the orca was relatively static and horizontally placed on the page, I realised that this made the orca look more like a lifeless object rather than a creature and it was quite boring to look at. It is because of this that I decided to rotate the orca 45 degrees and increased the size of it. Doing so made the orca look like it was swimming down in the ocean. I also edited the ocean to make it darker so that it looked more like deep sea. For the text I went for a less is more approach and wrote the simple but effective sentence ‘Stop Single Use Plastic’, it gets my message across without taking up too much space on the page.

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There have been times this week where I have thought about giving up on the zine and just moving on to a second brief, mainly because I didn’t expect to be doing this during a lockdown. I don’t yet have a back cover, or a contents page or anything of the sort, there is still a lot of work to do on the zine and not a lot of time. I wasn’t planning on spending this much time on the zine, according to my time plan which I created at the start of the project, I should have finished it by now. Admittedly my time management has been a lot worse during the course of this project, compared to the last ones and I am far less motivated than usual. I just can’t give on the zine yet though, I’m so close to finishing it and the illustrations I have so far look amazing. I just need to push myself for another week at least and hopefully by then I’ll be able to say that I have a finished zine.