Shape Face, Land of The Ugly, Dream Beam

November has been an exciting month for my career. I also turned 24 this month, and got to spend some much needed quality time with my favourite mother! Christmas card orders were folded, cut, packed, and shipped, I worked on a number of exciting client projects, and I got to see my work in the great and wonderful Reader's Digest!

The month started with the Toronto Canzine festival, where I tabled with my axe throwing buddy Melanie Hilder, a very charming very funny comic artist. I lugged 4 bags of decorations to the event, and we lucked out and got an incredible table at the very front of the Great Hall room. Three new zines made their debut, The Land of the Ugly and Shape Face (strange and wonderful collaborations with Derek Christoff (D-Sisive)) and Dream Beam (with Penny Forde). It was a great experience and I met so many enthusiastic artists! No one liked Shape Face even thought it is quite possibly my favourite thing I have ever made, but I understand it is a bit of an odd zine. All zines are available at etsy.com/shop/briannedonut.

I am continuing to experiment with my product photography to make my work stand out on Etsy. So far I have seen a small increase in favourites and sales, but right now is the magic 12 weeks before Christmas so that could also explain it.

Shape Face started as an illustration experiment. I filled the page (above) with all different shapes and built the facial features on top, allowing the faces to just become whatever they become. Some worked well, some are strange, but overall I think the faces have definite personality and a very contemporary look to them. I felt a great sense of relief after I finished Shape Face, as if I had figured out a huge component of my style as an artist. I always struggled with drawing people and often ended up working in styles that were more referential than I would like. When I finished Shape Face I felt I had created something original. I guess that is why it is my favourite piece so far, it opened up a lot of possibilities for me!

I submitted Shape Face to Broken Pencil for review, so hopefully they like it!

The Land of the Ugly began as a song by Derek Christoff, and morphed into an illustrated lyric book of sorts. The final zine is pretty grotesque looking. My favourite page is on the back, with a character I have named "Oil Face Boil Face". This one goes in the "things my mother will never understand" pile.

On November 15th the wonderful women at Fat Girl Food Squad took all of my zines on the road to Hamilton Feminist Zine Fair! Land of the Ugly and Anxious 2 were well received. Shape Face was not.

ANXIOUS 2 ZINE NOW AVAILABLE!

I did it! I finished ANXIOUS 2, and it is now for sale on my Etsy shop!

The last week putting this together was very interesting. I definitely found myself too close to the project, constantly going back and redoing pages, obsessing over the order of the pages, I could have picked at each page forever, but at some point I had to walk away and be done. 

I am very happy with how it turned out, looking at it now. I got it to a place where I was content with every page.

ANXIOUS #2 - IMPROVEMENTS

As some of you know I have been plugging away at a new black and white comic zine about Anxiety. I haven't been posting a lot of the illustrations I have been working on for this on facebook or twitter, so I figured it was time I update you.

After completing my very first zine (also about anxiety), ANXIOUS, I was ready to keep drawing and keep improving. I guess art is like that, as soon as you finish something you are overcome with hatred for it and just want to create something BETTER. I am extremely proud of ANXIOUS, but I see all of the things I would do differently every time I read it.

Here are some of the things I will be doing better for zine #2

TYPOGRAPHY:

For ANXIOUS I wanted to hand write all of the text, because I thought it was important to have my fingerprints on everything. I never get to see everyone's interesting writing anymore because we're all frantically typing away, and I thought it would be more personal if I wrote everything with my tablet pen. Unfortunately I was doing everything in photoshop, and the words came out a bit blurry and sad. AND wonky. Very wonky. I have a tendency to write on an extreme slant when using my tablet, and it took a lot of editing to make the text in ANXIOUS at all legible. It really limited how much text was in the zine, because I couldn't write huge paragraphs without it being unreadable.

SO for zine #2 I experimented with a number of handwriting fonts, but it all felt too impersonal and cold, and when I looked at it all I could see was the writing of someone else explaining my very personal experiences. Luckily my friend Cal swooped in and showed me how to convert my writing to a font that I could type out, which I knew was possible but never knew was SO EASY. I used Myscriptfont.com and it worked perfectly.

MORE COMICS:

Because of my new brianneburnell font, I am able to have a lot more text in the zine, and it doesn't take a zillion years to get it in there. This means MORE COMICS less full page illustrations. The Americano comic in ANXIOUS was my favourite page and I decided zine #2 should have a lot more content like that. The pizza comic below shows the new font, and one of the many comics.

LENGTH:

Zine #2 will be 32 pages, while ANXIOUS was only 20. Maybe I had just seen all of the images so often that flipping through ANXIOUS felt really short, or maybe it was really short. All I know is when I got to the end I felt like it was over too soon. There were also some things I couldn't explain fully in ANXIOUS because of the page limitations I had originally set, so that left it with a lot of one page comics/illustrations. Zine #2 will have more double page comics and at least one 3-page comic.

HUMOUR:

Everyone who knows me knows I have always, and will always, find the humour in having anxiety. You can't survive it if you don't laugh at yourself and your life. Plus laughing is good for you. ANXIOUS had some really sad pages that I found really hard to draw. And after I did draw them I wanted to curl up in bed forever. I know that people do really connect with the sad, personal stuff, and I do love connecting with people, but I don't like portraying my life that way because a lot of times it is really awesome and crazy and silly and not sad. Zine #2 will have more humour because I think my experience with anxiety is funnier than I portrayed in ANXIOUS. There will still be some sad stuff though.

STYLE:

I was still majorly experimenting when I worked on ANXIOUS, and although I am still experimenting now (and forever) I think I have found a style that I can use consistently throughout zine #2. It also helps that everything is black and white in zine #2 and I don't have to worry about making cohesive colour choices throughout.

ALSO, I would like to mention two artists who have really inspired me with this zine.

Firstly, Hyperbole and a Half, which I have always loved, published the best book ever. I begged Eric to buy it for me for Christmas, and then read the whole thing in one sitting. It is the funniest book ever, and Allie is really great at explaining things in comic form, the funny and the sad. She also colour coded the pages, which you can see on the side of the pages, so each story is a different colour which made it really easy to find each story.

Secondly, OYSTERFACE. I ordered this super intricate black and white zine on Etsy, and it came all the from Australia and went straight into my heart. The artist, Ben Constantine, is seriously talented. This zine definitely showed me that black and white doesn't have to be blocky and boring, it can be so intricate and beautiful! I turn to this zine when I miss working with colour and need to be inspired again. You can read the entire thing here. 

I am aiming to have this zine complete in the next 2 weeks. I have 15 of the 32 pages remaining. I am currently stuck on one specific illustration and it is driving me crazy! Anyway, thanks for reading my long-winded update and I hope now you want to go make cool things.

Woops

It has been approximately a million years since I have blogged. While I don't really do New Years resolutions, blogging more in 2014 is probably a good idea.

A lot happened in December 2013. I completed my first zine, a 20 page zine full of colour illustrations about anxiety and my life. I have sold about 20 of them so far, enough to help cover half of the next months rent. ANXIOUS is available here.

After a nice Christmas holiday in Thunder Bay with my parents, which included an amazing day of skiing and tons of food, I began working on a book cover for a friend of mine. She wrote an extremely compelling novella which I devoured in 2 days. The finished cover:

 

I received a ton of positive feedback on this cover, and I managed to complete it really quickly which I was thrilled about.

I am now working on a new black and white zine (two actually, but one is a little secret), which I will update you on in a new post.

Project in the works

I am very excited about a new personal project I will be working on, a zine about anxiety and depression, based on my personal experiences. The zine will include some of my comics, illustrations and a teeny bit of writing.

I will have the zine complete by DEC 15, at which point I will be printing and assembling it myself. I splurged on a 25 dollar long reach ruler and everything!

Below are some of the complete or partially complete pieces for the zine.