A little zine exercise: the stick
Hello ! It’s Lea again.
I hope you had a great week. If you don’t know me, nice to meet you! This is Sunday Spreads, my personal weekly illustration challenge. This week, I wanted to make something a little different! I ended up making a zine, as a children book, a little story that can fit in 3 or 4 pages.
The story came really randomly as I was doodling on my lunch break at work. Sometimes I also like to doodle with my left hand ( my non dominant hand) and I end up with weird interesting shapes.
The doodle started little hand drawings, trying to imitate cave painting from memory. I think I still had in mind the documentary episode of Cunk on Earth about Cave painting in which she says, I quote:
“I’m entering a cave, not by mistake or because I’m a wolf. But because I’ve been asked specifically to come here by the producers to look at cave art. Cave painting like these are one of the first example of civilisation on earth... Don’t worry, it gets better”
If you haven’t watched Cunk on Earth, it is one of the funniest educational shows I have ever watched. And I fully recommend it! Going back to cave painting: there is something so graphic and stylised in those painting that I want to infuse in my work and in this week’s exercise. I mean look at these at the Lascaux cave. Absolutely stunning.
If you go to a museum, like a national gallery, as you walk on the path indicated by the little museum map you took at the lobby, you can see the history of Art take a very distinct path. You walk past ancient ceramics, to medieval art, baroque, Renaissance, etc… and Philomena Cunk, in all her comedic ignorance, might be right. One might think that the art gets better. But what is better ? More realistic? That is probably what centuries of academic standards for art established in a lot of our current artistic world.
Thank goodness for a few contemporary art rebels in the 20th century, I keep looking at artist like Klee, Kandinsky or Chagall and I want to one day be able to invoice this poetic abstraction in my work, or at least some stylisation. And as I look at the way Chagall paints animals…
I can’t help to wander if he ever stumbled upon some cave art painting that could’ve inspired him.
Anyway, this week’s quest: make a zine. I actually followed the most common pattern, with a piece of A4 paper and just sketched directly on my tiny book/zine.
I then took this into Procreate to clean it but before that I needed to have a clearer direction for the characters. So I did this little character sketch :
Trying to capture the style of a charcoal line + painted pigment for the fill. I initially thought I would have time to think of the color, but the final result is in Black and white ( also easier to print).
Here is the final zine:
If you would like to print it, you can find the file here ! And this is how it should fold after cutting the black line in the middle :
And here is the final print result !
Let me know what you think, and don’t hesitate to reach out, I am always looking to connect with fellow artists & illustrators to share the joys and sorrows of creating pretty pictures from our heads.
Lea
