The March Creative Challenge: Dérangé Désir: the process

As I got deeper into the March creative challenge, I assembled all the drawing I had made that I would use for my mini comic and marveled at how bad I thought they were. I wanted to keep the feeling of the hand drawn images, even if they were rudimentary.

The first step was to render the drawings digitally. I'm sure I did this the most inefficient way possible. I simple scanned each drawing and made them into a .pdf. Then I opened the .pdf in Illustrator. Once in Illustrator I took a few different approaches, but the end result was a much cleaner version of what I had drawn. Now, if I had a digital sketch pad, I could have simply drawn them digitally to begin with.

In Illustrator I had a few choices to make. I decided to keep everything in black and white. This was somewhat of a funny thing because I had made an initial mood board and it included a color palette. I made it black and white only because I wanted to make these drawings into the classic 8 panel zine. That said, I wanted to reproduce these easily and cheaply. A black and white photocopy doesn't cost nearly as much as the color one does.

Then, once I had all my images the way I wanted them, I was able to resize them to format of the zine. When using a standard letter size piece of paper, each panel gets to 4.25'' by 2.75'' with very little room for error. Each of my images I put to words and then I fitted them on the panel. I made a few new illustrations and I was off.

When making these zines, I kept the photocopier in mind. Each photocopier will grab the paper differently, so I had to make sure the images all stayed on their respective pages. I kept this in mind and I made my layout accordingly.

I went to the copy center, and I made copies and it worked.

I took my favorite illustration from the series and made it into a cover for the four comics I made, so that they all stayed together. The real inspiration was the size. Years ago, I was taken with the repurposed cigarette machines in Las Vegas that sold art. So, that's what I did.