BEHOLD, GAME BIRD COLOR
I finally finished my first ever zine! It's called Game Bird Color and it's currently the only field guide to video game bird characters that I'm aware of.
Making the zine was a huge ordeal. Originally planned to be black and white sketches, I decided to color one and when I hid the lineart on Photoshop I fell in love with the solid color, lineless style and decided to make that the whole thing. The plan was to start small and draw 6 characters--just enough to get my toes wet and have a finished product to call my own. However, there are a lot of cool birds in the video game world and before I knew it the page count had more than doubled to 15 illustrations!
Then the troubles came. As I was just finishing up the zine and getting ready to lay it out and send it to the printer, I did...something with my photoshop file that ended up eating the project. All pages, gone forever. Rather than giving up (which I almost did) I redrew it, working from screenshots I had thankfully taken of some of the pages and relying on my terrible memory for the rest.
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| It wouldn't be a Ribbon Black project without references to games nobody but me cares about |
So I finished the zine, again, and sent it to the printer. An eternity later and they come back, looking pretty damn good! Except for the artifacting, of course. I had somehow exported the pdf in a compressed form even though "Press Quality" had been selected. The artifacts are faint, but as Vanilla Ice said, "anything less than the best is a felony". Once I pulled myself from the depths of depression over that, I decided that for its flaws it's still a zine, and zines aren't supposed to be perfect. So I decided to sell it!
Game Bird Color is 15 pages, printed on nice thick glossy stock with cute hand-stitched binding by my fiance! Supplies are quite limited. If you want a copy, I have it for sale here:
Big Cartel shop (recommended as you don't need an account to purchase)
Etsy shop (more expensive because of their fees, but if you wanna use Etsy...)