Riso Zine: Fabulous Creature
Project Brief
This project is to come up with the theme for our zine and use only unconventional media to create an illustration and add the text digitally for the zine. Then create two layers in InDesign for the two colors (of our choice) for the Riso printer.
Process
Research
I had many theme ideas that I wanted to use for my zine and the one that I picked was monsters as fashion models. To keep it short, the reason why I picked it is that I adore monster designs from movies and other forms of media and how grotesque they look. Their “ugly” appearance can be used as a sort of fashion statement that they don’t need to be “conventionally attractive” for people to like them. What I did for this step is to gather all the images of various monster designs to use as a reference for my monster zine called “Fabulous Creature.”
Sketches
Once I have picked my theme, I then proceed to do sketches of various monster designs that I want to use for my zine. Above are the sketches that I have made both traditionally and digitally. Some have been redesigned and others have been cut from either it is too complex or not enough room for my zine. After the sketching process is done, I picked five monster designs and moved on to refine them with unconventional media.
Unconventional Media
This step is where I began to use unconventional media to create illustrations for my zine. Most of the materials that I have used are cardstock (colored), glue, sharpie, cotton ball, and much more. The top two are examples of what I have made with the materials listed in this section. Once I finished creating my monsters, I would take pictures of them with my phone and send them to my laptop via Bluetooth. The pictures I took were then sent to Photoshop and did some adjustments to separate certain parts into two major color layers: black and red. After that is done, I made sure that all of the layers were in greyscale and printed my zine in the Riso printer. The results are provided below.
Final Design
Final design in black and white; prepped for the Riso printer
Unfolded zine
Opened and closed zine
This is the final design for this project. This is an accurate representation of what it looks like if it was printed in real life and helps visualize how the zine would look like in 3D space (see above).
