Artist Statement:
For my project, I wanted to make something centered around my parent’s cats. We have had two cats named Baby Dallas and Milkshake for the past 3 years, and my parents recently adopted a third cat. I often find myself wondering throughout the day how the cats are doing. As you can probably imagine, there has been some tension between the cats and some adjustments on the part of our third cat, named Pudge. This zine is meant to be an exaggerated reflection of my imagination, wondering what my cats are up to throughout the day. I used elements of surrealism and took inspiration from different types of music, games, and TV shows. My main inspirations for the look of this zine were Mazzy Star, Night in the Woods, and Gravity Falls. I had so much fun with the Photoshop part of the assignment, I enjoyed laying out landscapes and building scenes for my zine. The Illustrator part was a little more difficult for me, but I eventually found an efficient way to add Illustrator work to all pages of my zines. My only complaint about this project is that I wish we had more time. I would have loved to experiment more with different mixed media aspects like paper cutouts and charms, and I also would have liked to experiment more with different binding styles. There are lots of interesting ways that I have seen other people bind their zines, I chose to do so with ribbon but would have loved to try other methods as well. I was a little unhappy with the way the zines got printed, they seem a little too dark, and one of my images got cut off at the top, but considering this was my first time printing so many photos, I think I will continue to improve the more zines I make.
