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In the studio today, trying to carve out some time to spend with a few looser ideas… I’m sharing a table with Charlit at the Dartmouth Comic Arts Festival, and need to make some stuff to show. I was thinking of tying some of the ideas into the themes I’ve been researching — which sounds like the obvious choice, but I’ve never really done a comic/zine about these kinds of things before.
Some ideas:
I’ve also been thinking about my Are.na collections as ways of generating new knowledge, or as material to work from. This is slightly different from my usual way of working, which is to have some kind of goal/vision that I then research (online or through making or otherwise) and collect material around on Are.na. But I’ve also had several collections of semi-random things that came instead from just noticing an attraction or connection to the theme, and continuing to add to the collection over time, without an end goal. These are the collections I was thinking about working with.
Some of them are:
I’m also inspired by this collection of Abstract Formalist Comics:
Did some little lettering and photocopying tests using a quote from my ‘Self - please be my friend’ channel. I want to try and turn it into a game, the act of drawing letters, with rules. I wrote it out in all-caps with ink, connecting the lines vertically. While the letters are wet they bleed into each other.
I tried photocopying it in different ways. I scrunched up the paper into a ball, photocopied it, then unfolded it and photocopied that. It’s kind of nice — ends up with gradations of grey. I like the image of the text on paper in a ball, though it’s illegible.
I took those two copies and traced over them with graphite on vellum. The full text one is tedious to do, but again I like the paper ball version.
I photocopied those, and then put them through this online dither tool. I like the patterns created by the dither, but only on the paper ball and transparency drawing ones, not the full text. I also wrote out another quote in blue ink and put it through, too. I’m not sure my writing is interesting enough on its own… will this just be a book of quotes?
I kind of like these ones where I played with overlapping blown-up parts of the other dithered images ontop… And it reminds me of QR codes, which I had thought to use to link videos/websites through the zine.
There is something really fun when viewing dithered images on a computer screen; you can probably see it here, scrolling or zooming the images.
Maybe it should just be a simple little experimental zine.