Some Things My Father Taught Me

A zine, a tiny manifesto, a tribute, a warning

Another day, another zine. [Much as I enjoyed squeezing this in today, a book a day, no matter how diminutive the volume, is a pace unlikely to be sustainable.]

That said, I was inspired by yesterday’s frantic zine creation exercise so I decided to see how far I could get with this little booklet, which was a bit better planned than Zine 001.

First up, the cover.

I started with a quick sketch making use of the Da Vinci Eye app (I’ve written about this in a previous newsletter - scroll back through the list on the landing page of this Substack and you’ll find it). I roughed in the hand lettering and some mountains at the bottom.

But then, a thought occurred to me…

Hand-lettering was not my only option when it comes to adding text. For one thing, I have a ton of paper of various tints and textures as well as a printer sitting right beside me doing nothing. So… I experimented a bit with printing out the text for the cover as well as adding colour (mostly watercolour pencils and a water brush).

I wanted to keep things very simple so I tried to keep the amount of text on each page to a minimum. In the first round, I wrote in the words using pencil and then added a pale wash of watercolour over each page.

I didn’t hate the printed text for the cover, so I thought I’d also experiment with printing text for the interior. While I was at it, I thought I’d take a look for some simple line drawings online, which I thought I could modify after the fact.

I’ll say right now that I would like to redo this booklet and do my own line drawings as I don’t think the borrowed art adds anything, but on the plus side, I think using printed words is an improvement over my terrible lettering (and, realistically, I am not going to live long enough to become proficient at all the things…)

As you flip through the rest of the pages you’ll see I drew over/added colour washes to the printed images and also traced over the top of the printed words (between the paint and the erasing of the original pencil marks the words were fading and getting hard to read). I don’t mind the faux hand-written effect and maybe if I trace enough words I might find my handwriting improves enough to not have to use the help.

And that, as they say, is all she wrote.

See you tomorrow!