I have spent the bulk of this week working on creating a back cover and inside pages for the zine so that it will be ready to upload online in the coming days. I had an idea of having a nice border around the Earth on the back cover to contrast the dark plastic border that I created for the front cover. I started by sketching out some colourful flowers in an arch that would be placed around a painting of the Earth, symbolising life and the hope that readers are more aware of how to consume consciously after reading my zine. 

I drew out the first set of flowers in brush pen on marker paper because I thought that it would be bold and vibrant, having had success with brush pen previously, I also added a black putnline to the flowers to make them stand out more, which ended up being a mistake because it make them look too dark and similar to the front cover design which is the opposite affect I was going for. I decided to move on and try using gouache paint on my design instead because of how well it went when I painted the advertisement anxiety woman. The flowers were only going to be one part of the design, I still needed to paint the Earth. I chose gouache as my medium this time instead of watercolour like I used for the front cover because gouache seems to be much bolder and easier to layer, it’s also opaque so I am able to paint over any mistakes that I make. It took me a couple of attempts to paint an Earth scene that I was happy with, but I got there in the end. I struggled at first because I am still relatively new to gouache paint, it behaves quite differently to watercolour. I also repainted the flowers in gouache paint so that it was consistent with the rest of the back cover design, using gouache went a lot better than brush pens. I digitally collaged the flowers and Earth together using Photoshop to complete the base of the design. I felt like it was missing something though, text. I decided to write something I was originally going to put on the front cover ‘waste less, live more’ in brush pen and digitally collaged that on to my back cover design also. The process I went through to finalise the back cover is displayed below.  

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I didn’t feel like the zine had enough pages, the layout I was using went straight from the front cover to the first main illustration which didn’t look very professional when compared to other zines and magazines in general. There are usually some inside pages of sorts, which is what I designed next. I used the gouache flowers that I painted for the back cover design and copied and pasted them over and over until they filled up an entire page. I then reduced their opacity and filled the background with a light pink that I sampled from the flowers to give them a faded, yet bright look. I chose to us the flowers as the basis of my inside page to add visual consistency to the zine. I then moved onto creating a contents and introduction page so that the audience could learn what the zine was about and what I am trying to achieve with it. I went through many different layouts for these pages and experimented a lot with hand written fonts, the processes of which can be found in the images below. I added the inside pages for another purpose too, to make sure my zine had 12 pages because it will make it easier to print and fold my zine when this coronavirus crisis is all over.  

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The zine is almost finished, which is a huge relief, all that is left to do now is upload it to flipsnack which is the website I have chosen to publish my sine because it seems to be very user friendly. I will do this in the next few days, as well as finalising  the layout in Indesign so that it is ready to be printed in the future. I still have a 2^nd brief to do as I set out to do originally at the start of his project, and I have so little time to do it, we’re already past the original deadline before it got extended to accommodate the current world situation. My time management has been pretty bad during the course of this project and quite frankly I am disappointed in myself for working so ineffectively. I know the world is all topsy turvy now but I didn’t expect myself to be this far behind my initial time plan. I can’t let the coronavirus stop me working well, especially when I start third year, there is no guarantee that I’ll be back at college by then, but I will have to manage my time so much more effectively because 3^rd year is where everything really matters.