Fold paper, make zines, take an art class!!!
IT RULES
Hello my friends,
It's December!! 🎄 I think I love December? I haven't given much thought to my tier list of the months, but December is Mariah Carey season and I love Mariah Carey. I've got a festive tree in my living room and I love trees. It's the time for reflection and planning and I love reflection and planning. I also made a few origami Santas and I love them too! December: A good month!!
December also marks 5 months into my job-free adventure. Before I embarked on this journey, I was worried that its time-bound and ambiguous nature might invite an ever-present dread. Like "Oh no, 5 precious months have already flown by! Oh no, I can't be job-free forever! Oh no, I don't have a concrete plan for the future! OH NO!"
Fives months in, I'm happy to report it doesn't feel that way at all! I feel I'm in a good groove, like hitting your stride 5 months into a job that really suits you. I've been exploring and making things and learning new skills and also learning so much about myself. I can't live joblessly forever (dang), and that is on my mind (dang), buuuut I have an idea of what I'm doing for the next 6 months (cool), and a much-vaguer-but-not-totally-invisible idea for the next 12 after that (cool!). That's good enough for now, for today, for December!
I hope December ranks high on your tier list too, and if not, maybe try making an origami santa!
♡ vrk
🆕 LAUNCHED: RECEIPT PRINTER RPG
I meant to have a chill November after a very busy October (Pouch! Receipt Printers! Travel! Classes! Bday! Halloween! AHH) but instead I wrote, illustrated, coded, printed and distributed a half-webcomic, half-activity-book Choose-Your-Own-Adventure-stye zine called Receipt Printer RPG. PHEW!
Buy it here: https://shop.pouchmagazine.com/b/v4GWK
The premise: You find a QR code coloring book, and as you color in a QR code, you… may or may not turn into a receipt printer. 🖨️ Then you go from there!!!! 😂
The inspiration: I hand-drew a QR code for the Receipt Printer Meetup, and it was very tedious lol. In the middle of coloring in grid squares, I think I slightly entered a fugue state where it occurred to me I was basically a human printer (!!), and I wanted to share that experience with the world!!!
It's made, it's done, there are 5 endings, and I am so proud of it!! I got to share it at a zine swap last week, I mailed 5 to sell at Quimby's Chicago, and submitted it for a one-month trial at Desert Island.
I'm sooo inspired by those stores btw!! They accept any zine, any comic and put it on their shelves for sale, with some very reasonable limitations in place to make this sustainable. It seems like a system that could never work but they make it work!
Could more stores do this? Where else could this be applied? I feel like there could be a stationery store equivalent?! "We'll sell 5 of any sticker" or something!!!
⏸️ Design story: Making someone pause
For Receipt Printer RPG, I spent a lot of time iterating on the cover because I knew that was something that I needed to make interesting and attention-grabbing. I thought it was my most important graphic to design.
But something was bugging me: I had given a few early copies of Receipt Printer RPG to a few friends, and as I watched them thumb through my zine, I realized they would skip right over the first QR code page – the most important page in the book!!
I realized that originally, I had solved the problem like an engineer: I wanted the reader to pause on that page, so…. I told them:
But what I needed to do was solve the problem with design: How do I make the reader pause without telling them to do so?
It was one day before the zine swap, and I still needed to print and assemble all my zines, so I didn’t have too much time to solve this!
I took a marker and just drew over the original layout:
Much clearer!! 😆
Isn’t it cool how you can use design to solve problems? The more I immerse myself in design, the more I’m confused why software engineers aren’t typically taught visual design, and why the tech industry largely views Design and Engineering as two totally separate* worlds, with totally different archetypes of people who pursue either. Design is an incredibly powerful tool for solving problems. It seems like “design” should be part of one’s engineering toolkit just as much as e.g. server or database knowledge!
*Of course there are design engineers! But broadly speaking it feels very binary.
🎨 The penultimate Figure Drawing class
I am almost finished with my Figure Drawing class, and wowowow I highly recommend Figure Drawing to anyone who wants to level up their drawing skills.
I’ve got a before & after for you:
Isn’t that wild!
Charcoal is cool because when you erase it, the erased marks linger as little ghost lines on the page. Because of this, you can literally see the struggle on the picture to the left 😂 and the lack thereof on the right!!
I also did a sketch night last night with my friend Adrienne (yet another one of my brilliant illustrator friends!!) and they came out pretty good!!
I’m so inspired by this class, taught by the incredible Judy Mannarino at SVA.
The course structure was mind-blowing to me:
One 3 hour class per week, where you draw the whole time for 3 hours.
There’s no homework outside of class time.
There are only ~10 concepts that you need to learn the entire class, and you hear them all on the first day. The remaining 10 weeks, the teacher repeats those concepts over and over again.
The class adapts to anyone’s skill level. The teacher walks around the room and gives personalized feedback to each person, showing them where they need to focus on each drawing.
AND IT’S EFFECTIVE.
At the figure drawing class last night, I found myself repeating the messages Judy taught us (“you look and you draw, you look and you draw” “if you can’t draw the shape, draw the negative space”). I didn’t learn this through studying; it was solely through attending class.
Once again I wonder, where else can we apply this? What does an intro programming class look like with no homework and 10 total concepts look like?
📖 Pouch Preview coming soon!!
I’m approaching the email length limit of the newsletter and I didn’t yet mention Pouch!!
Worry not!!! It is….
I have finished Pouch Preview and 20 copies are being printed via Mixam.
In December+January I’ll be working on the landing page for Pouch and getting the store (!!!) ready for preorders. I’m getting excited!!! Stay tuned 😎
📮 miscellaneous
And I still can’t stop thinking about this giant bichon
Take art classes, everyone! Your life will be better!!!
you look you draw, you look you draw ;)
YOU RULE!!!!!!!!!!