This week I have spent a lot of time working on my front cover design and developing my ideas. I felt like this was necessary because I wasn’t happy with any of the front cover designs I did previously. The front cover is the first thing people are going to see and will likely determine whether or not someone decides to read and buy a publication, so it is essential that I take my time with it and create a design that will grab people’s attention.

I started this week by sketching out a few ideas I had of how I could show the damaging affect plastic and pollution has on the Earth. I decided that the best way to do this would be to show plastic and pollutants consuming the wonders of the world. My first sketch shows plastic bottles, bags and meat covering the entirety of the Earth in an absolute mess. The composition of this sketch wasn’t very good, it was far too haphazard and covered too much of the planet so I decided to not pursue this design. My 2^nd sketch was a lot better than the first, I positioned the plastic and pollutants to the top and bottom of the page to create a border that encloses on the Earth. My idea behind this was to give the impression that the pollutants are attacking the world. I still thought that the composition could do with some improvements though, it didn’t look enough like the pollutants were attacking the planet, but rather falling on it.

My 3^rd attempt at creating the front cover went a lot better than the first, I used a 2b pencil to sketch out the design before painting the Earth with watercolour paints. Once the Earth was painted I used biro pen to draw the pollutants enclosing around the Earth, I tried to make them look like fangs to symbolise the negative effect overconsumption has on the planet. I was really happy with this design and I’m confident that it is the one that I am going to take forward and use as my final front cover.

An important part of any front cover and publication is the title, which is something I didn’t have. What I did have though is a few ideas, from Plastic Planet to Consume Your Doom, but I ended up going for To Die For? I chose this because is a term often used to describe a strong desire for something. In this sense, it asks if all of the consuming is worth the plant dying. I tried writing out my chosen title in a few different fonts which I have displayed on the above pages. On the pages below, I have chosen to display the process I used to digitally put my front cover together.

Admittedly, I am still having a hard time motivating myself during the course of this project due to the fact that I’m working at home. I am slowly slipping behind my initial time plan week by week, I should really have finished at least one of my final designs by now, if not more. I am worried that I will have to alter the plans I set out in my proposal and treatment if the deadline isn’t extended or something because of the coronavirus crisis. I just don’t have the space to work effectively like I did when I had access to college facilities, nor do I have access to certain materials and devices that would benefit me greatly, such as an A3 scanner, riso graph machine and printing facilities. I am doing my best to achieve what I set out to do at the start of this project, it is just going slower than I’d hoped it would.

Week 2 of doing project work at home, I have found that my time management is a lot worse now, despite the fact I created a timetable prior to starting the project that essentially mapped out the following 8 weeks. I guess it is just going to take time to adjust to life in lockdown. This experience will also benefit me in life after college as I won’t have a separate building to go to, I’ll most likely be working from home then, as I am now so this will prepare me for that.

I have currently come up with 3 main ideas for the zine and made sketches to illustrate them. The drawings are really ropey, but they are just initial sketches and will improve dramatically over time. My first idea depicts a woman who is constantly being bombarded by advertisements that tell her to buy things, the constant pressure has driven her into serious anxiety. I came up with this idea because the Conscious Consumption brief suggested that we explore not just what we consume, but why, and advertisements are certainly a huge part of why we buy so much. They are everywhere, at home on your tv, in magazines, newspapers, online. They don’t stop inside either, almost everywhere you go outside, especially in more urban areas, there are advertisements on huge billboards, on buses and at bus stops, even on the side of bridges. Always telling you to buy something new and this can put a lot of pressure on people to buy more stuff. It has also created a culture where you can be considered uncool if you don’t own the latest thing, latest fashion trend or technological item. People can bully you for it and that adds to the pressure to consume even more. I really want to show this from a focused and personal point of view by depicting what the pressure can do one single person.

With my second idea I am aiming to show where the plastic people discard ends up, in the stomachs of marine animals. While it may not be clear with my initial sketch, this illustration will depict an orca made up entirely of ocean plastic, symbolising how plastic is consuming the ocean and everything within it. This is my favourite idea out of the three I currently have, as it tries to raise awareness to an issue I care greatly about, animal conservation. I want to show people that their actions have consequences that affect innocent creatures that have no way of fighting back against the things we do. The idea will be largely visually inspired by the work of Good Wives and Warriors who often create highly complicated illustrations that are made up of smaller illustrations and digitally collage them together.

Finally, my third idea takes a less negative approach to showing Conscious Consumption. It would show the planet made up of small consumer products. On one side of the earth there will be products that are harmful for the environment, such as single use plastic water bottles. The other side of the earth will be made up of eco-friendly alternatives to harmful products, such as reusable steel water bottles which don’t end up in the ocean. The aim of this illustration would be to educate people on sustainable buying by showing them that there are less harmful ways to consume without making any big changes to their lives. Small changes, big impact.

Normally I would choose one of the ideas to develop and take forward, however, since I am creating a zine which is going to require multiple illustrations, I am most likely going to develop all three of them. I may even come up with more ideas as I go along. My next step is creating development drawings from these initial sketches and also researching ways I could make a zine. Currently I am thinking of using the one page zine method as it is the only one I am familiar with, I haven’t really created a zine before so I am going to need to research a lot.

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.

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.