Zine Project and Artist Statement

(Below: The cover for this blog post)

Artist Statement

I think throughout my whole artist journey, I’ve come to these five ideas: exploration, experimentation, struggle, execution, and excitement. To me they represent the joys and struggles of creating a project and are there as a reminder to always have fun with my art. I had a lot of ideas when I was brainstorming, however none of them jumped out to me, I really wanted to create a project that touched the viewer and above all was interactive. On a different occasion, I was scrolling through images on Pinterest and came across a few pins I had saved. They were silly, printable cats that you could fold into little 3D creatures. I really felt a connection to this idea and knew that I had to do it. It was fun, exploratory, and interactive. I made the outlines in Adobe Illustrator and transferred them into photoshop to put my own designs on. Honestly, I struggled a lot throughout the process. It was really hard making sure that I got the correct solid and dotted lines, but even so as I was cutting out some of my own pages, I realized I missed a few spots. I think the hardest one was putting my dog onto one of the templates. I had to find good images to use to represent the front, top, back and sides of his head and body, yet none of the pictures I took were good. So in the end I ended up using a multitude of Photoshop tools to match textures and to also match color, saturation, and brightness. Overall I’m very happy with the way my zine came out, as I am planning on printing more for my friends in other states. Through this zine project, I hoped I could bring exploration, experimentation, struggle, execution, and, above all, joy only to myself, but also to the viewer.

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