Artist Statement : Zine Project

This Zine project was incredibly fulfilling to me, and I enjoyed every second of the creative process. The simple overview of my piece is this: a cohesive zine that showcases street and/or skate style. I was inspired by my love for fashion and my own personal style, as well as my boyfriend's personal style. I had made a few photoshop pieces prior to finding a style that I particularly enjoyed. The first page that I created within this piece was the collage consisting of the man with stickers on his face, the dead end sign, and the orange. This felt satisfying and pleased me to look at, so I kept creating similar piece. Using Photoshop and Illustrator on the Adobe Creative Cloud, I copy and pasted the same color blue into background of each piece in order to create a cohesive feeling. I also felt called to use pops of orange (or warm colors in general) in order to create a contrast using the complementary color theory. For this, I used a lot of the "color replacement tool" on Photoshop. Once I found a flow, each piece felt very organic to create. I did have a harder time using Illustrator, however it was a fun challenge and I am satisfied with all of the pieces I created on it. Mainly, I used Illustrator to add my own doodles onto the pages. This added a level of personality to the pages that would not have been there otherwise, and I think it created a "fun" effect. After the completion of all of my pages, I put them all into InDesign (which is another application found on the Adobe Creative Cloud). This allowed me to lay out my pages, and I spent some time rearranging them until I was satisfied. Then, I took this digitally finished piece to the Printing Lab found in the Visual Arts Complex on CU's campus. Here, a TA helped me print my zines! Unfortunately, despite our exhausted efforts, we were unable to print the pages on both the front and back of the paper. I did decide to use the nicer paper, and ended up spending $50. I left feeling a bit defeated, but decided to tape the pages together in order to make it feel more like a magazine/dispose of the white pages in between each art-filled page. While frustrated, I am still satisfied with my completed piece. Overall, this was a very fun project and I aim to find another printing option in order to print one zine in the way that I had originally envisioned.