Trusting Your Intuition
Let's explore the process of making an inky little zine and the tactile joy of analog art materials.
I’ve been spending a lot of time drawing digitally lately. I love digital drawing! I can test ideas quickly. I can edit anything I want. I can work in low light from the comfort of my couch. But after a while, I get weird and restless because I’m craving the tactile joy of working with analog materials and making a mess. I’ve been admiring multi-panel sketchbook studies on Instagram lately where people tape off a series of squares and blob on colors to practice compositions. They struck me as abstract comics pages, and soon I wanted to make organized blobs too! I made a chaotic and colorful one first, which I promptly chopped up and made into a mini zine that I may share in a future newsletter. But today I’m going to share my second attempt. I taped this one in a way that I could fold it into a mini zine.
Here it is post-inking, pre-tape removal.
My goal was to take an intuitive approach, not necessarily in the traditional meditative doodling sense, but more so with the goal of sinking into the process of physically moving ink around on paper and letting go of the outcome. I didn’t look for reference images like I normally do. I didn’t want to get too precious with it. I reluctantly accepted that the end result might be total garbage and just tried to make eight little squares that felt right in the moment.
I always have to push through some resistance to make the first few indelible marks on a fresh piece of paper. But once I actually start, I love the forward momentum of working with ink. There’s no undo. You just have to trust yourself and forge ahead. The process makes me feel very present. One mark after another.
After it dried and I removed the tape, I added some words I had scribbled down in my notebook earlier, while I was contemplating my desire to get out of my own head and make things with physical materials. Then I carefully scored the paper (because I used thick watercolor paper), folded, and trimmed the edges.
At the end of this post, I share a printable version of this zine with paid subscribers. Upgrade your subscription to get in on printable zines and art shared every Sunday! Also, if you want to make your own inky zine, I have folding instructions here.
Here is the finished zine:
Thanks for reading
Thanks for being here! It truly means the world to me to connect with you every week. In case you missed it, last week wrote about How I Illustrate Poems.
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