VALDES ARTS 345: Skillshare Tutorial 5

This week, I watched the Skillshare video "Making your First Zine: From Idea to Illustration" by Kate Bingaman-Burt. I love the low-pressure fun and funkiness of zine making and how interesting it is to see different illustrators use it as a quick and fun method to create something that is self-published. To start, she showed us some inspiration from her own work with zines and talked through different prompts. I loved her design style and how simple, fun, and humorous it was. I think the prompts were so fun and interesting which is what I love so much about zine making is the DIY attitude and sort of loose and playful style that Kate talks about. I loved her projects on objects of consumption, it's such an interesting concept; it's fun and quirky but has a lot of meaning if you really think about it. She talks about how when you make a zine, you want your lines to be thick, bold, and consistent because they have to be able to be photocopied, which I never really thought about. I enjoyed learning about the history of zines, which was a nice little tidbit I didn't expect to get out of this tutorial that I found really interesting. As someone who is really interested in this punk sort of DIY music scene poster design, I really enjoy this era of zines. It was also so interesting to hear how she talks about how zines are so personal with the artist and can really be a way for an artist to share their ideas and opinions. I also found it super interesting how she recommends finding inspiration when she sits down to draw by just drawing what's around her; she just draws whatever is on her desk or in her medicine cabinet to create a jumping-off point. Kate also recommends collage when making zines and organizing and building a collage file so that you can create a library of images. After watching this, I was super inspired and would really like to get into creating illustrative zines more!