Brixton Market

This time the theme was about food, so I followed the group to a sketch session in Brixton Market, which will help me in future work, and these are the pictures I took on the site. I like the atmosphere of the market very much because I always buy some processed meat in the supermarket, but I have never entered the market to choose ingredients, which makes me feel interesting, but the smell from different stalls makes me feel a little sick, and it is easy to stain my shoes, I don’t think I will go to the market very often.

Brixton Market Sketch exercise

I sketched different stalls with different ingredients, I sketched seafood with a blue pen and I would sketch meat with a red pen, while I sketched vegetables and food in the way I am used to, I felt that sketching on site gave me different senses, when I sketched seafood and meat I would smell different fishy smells and this would directly affect my work.Sketching in real time will affect my lines, which are easily distorted and will affect the whole picture. I couldn’t bring a lot of material with me which would mean that I could only sketch with a few pens, which made me feel uncomfortable because it was easy to drop a pen during a pen change project and I didn’t have enough space to sketch.

Development and discovery

In class we drew pictures of our favourites foods and made eating utensils. I wrapped wire mesh around a spoon and glued different materials of paper on top to form a spoon. food so it would inhibit my eating speed. I will start developing my project with the theme of appetite suppression. While doing these tasks, I started thinking about my topic. I was confused about which topic I should start with. I started thinking about my favorite food. Food is a tool for me to release my emotions. When I am unhappy, I like to eat sweets or junk videos to satisfy myself and vent my emotions. But this tends to make me fat, and I need to exercise to burn off the excess calories, which gives me a headache, so I might start thinking about my topic in terms of appetite suppression.

Primary Research

Lauren Martin

Working mainly digitally, illustrator and designer Lauren Martin finds humour and inspiration in nature and the mundane. In her world, flowers have faces, pieces of fruit have legs, and every inanimate object has a personality. I like how she adds faces to the food, the anthropomorphic food becomes more interesting and her use of mosaic-like borders I like I may consider adding this element to my work. The illustrator adds different expressions to each kind of food and can also see different emotions, which enrich the picture and attracts the audience to appreciate it more.

Lucia Calfapietra

Picnic, personal project, 2020

Still Life with Oranges and Drinks, 202

Lucia Calfapietra is a freelance illustrator based in Paris, France, specializing in editorial illustration, food illustration, and children’s art. I love her clever use of superimposed colors to make the picture rich and full. Some of the colors don’t line up and become natural shadows, which may be the charm of Riso. Riso can do a similar print style directly for me, and this color overlay gives the image a retro look.

Cristina Daura

To really know someone

women rights recession 

Color test

I did a color test with hamburgers. I want to make a booklet that can reduce people’s appetite. I think blue and green are easy to suppress people’s appetite. I might use a lot of colors that end up suppressing appetite for my brochures.

The zine exhibition

I attended the magazine production workshop. Each zine has a different story and theme. Each zine has a very different style, which appeals to me so I will be producing my results in the form of a zine. These books were displayed in different materials, some smooth, some rough, and even some foam paper. I was curious about all this, and I wanted to make a booklet to show my illustrations. I have documented some of the typography I like, which I will use in my final product.

Learn to use Riso

I am very interested in Riso and I hope I can print my Zine with Risograph. I have attended the course of Risograph and learned the principle of Riso and how to use it. I am curious about how Riso works, and I watched how the teacher operated it. Riso can adjust the color by itself and the particles are closely arranged, which makes my Zine unique. I really like this way to present my final effect.

Learn how to make Zine

Learning how to make Zines ahead of time will help me get up to speed with my Zine production and learn more about it at a later stage. I watched this video very carefully and learned the arrangement rules of Zines. When making Zines, I need to pay attention to the front and back of the printed pictures, because the top and the bottom are not arranged in accordance with the conventional arrangement method.

Mind map

Title of Zine：The Nasty Ice Cream

Exhibition format：Zine（use Risograph to print）

Audience：Some people who like the challenge of horrible 

and disgusting food or who want to lose weight.

Why I chose this theme?

I still can’t stop eating some desserts, ice cream is my favourite, but desserts tend to make me fat, have acne and tooth decay, so I wanted to curb my craving for desserts by making zine.

Digital illustration is being adjusted

At first the ice creams and ice cream van I drew started to stray from my theme, they didn’t look scary or gross so I added horror elements, eyeballs, demons, skulls etc. I will start to think about what colors are suitable for my whole theme, and I hope the colors of my Zine are uniform in style.

Planning my zine

Original version

The initial version was plain, but there were some elements that could have been kept and I thought about how to make the ice cream a little more disgusting. My mentor gave me some suggestions, which could be described from different perspectives, not necessarily positive, but also overlooking or looking up. I could not limit myself to normal perspectives. I began to seriously think about how to modify my Zine.

Final version

The initial version was plain, but there were some elements that could have been kept and I thought about how to make the ice cream a little more disgusting. The final version added some logo patterns similar to Halloween type and some things that I was afraid of or hated, but I didn’t want to lose the sense of fun, so I designed the ice cream truck to be cute, which will add more fun.

Prepare for Riso printing

I did the automatic colour separation by using CMYK mode from Photoshop, I will use Riso to print and use the four colours to overlay to finally get my Zine. The first time to use the color separation software for color separation will be a memorable process in the printing process, which represents that I really learned to use Riso to print my works. I am looking forward to my final result. I may sell my Zine in some small markets, which can promote my illustrations and get some money from it to prove that my brochure is popular.

Final outcome

I mock up the final piece so that I can see more visually the presentation of my zine. My work is in my expectation, because I don’t want to make a completely disgusting Zine, so I choose pink as the background color of the cover, which can ease the nausea behind the production of ice cream.

Comments from fellow classmates

I can feel that Jo is very eager for me to make my Zine larger. Since it is the first time for me to print, I did not control the size properly. Jo thinks that if I print bigger, the details of my book can be shown more clearly. So I’m going to reprint my work, which is a very useful suggestion. Fred give me very useful advice, I watched the video that Fred recommended me, and it gave me a lot of better ideas, which will help me a lot in the future to make this type of work. I love his sharing.

Reflections

The students in the group gave me good advice and comments and I was happy to read them. I spent a lot of time deciding on a topic for this project and I was torn between which topic to choose. I also had to book a place in advance to learn and use Riso to print, which disrupted a lot of my planning and I should plan ahead before starting a new project to avoid this tedium. I did not consider the size of Zine when I printed it, so the printed version was very small at the beginning, so many details could not be shown well, so I will adjust the size and print it again. I wanted to challenge the gross and weird genre of illustration, so I would appreciate more illustrators who like to draw weird illustrations. Each project is only given one month’s production time, which is a very short time, so the management of each step of the process needs to take into account the time issue. I still adjust my homework the day before the presentation, so I have to manage my own time for the next project. I always complain that I don’t have enough time, but proper planning is probably okay. I am very happy to know how Riso works through this project and I am very happy to learn screen printing and other different ways to present my works in the later stage.

Studio selection

I think my second project belongs to Studio 2, because my final outcome is a Zine suitable for teenagers and above. I plan to print my Zine with Riso to promote myself, and I will print several more copies so that I can send them to my friends.