power-saving mode | making-of

I thought I'd make a small making-of post, for anyone who's interested in this sort of thing!

I made this zine in a pretty much entirely visual manner - I started with the thumbnails, trying to translate my thoughts and feelings as directly into words and images as I could.  I wanted this to be a low-stress project, something that would be fairly fun and satisfying to make!  So I did my best not to worry too much over wording and composition and mainly focused on the flow of the zine.

As you can see, the thumbnails are very messy and unrefined- their main job was to get the general idea down, so once I was happy with them I moved them into some fancier drawing software (read: Clip Studio Paint), and started refining things by adding in some proper lettering and some panel borders/backgrounds.

Once I was happy with my words and their placement, I moved on to drawing!  I started by sketching over top of my thumbnails to produce something more readable.  You can actually see most of the sketches I drew in the final pages!  I decided to leave them in as a stylistic choice, and also to distract from any wonky lineart ;-p

I find it interesting that the main colour in the thumbnails is red (like blood) but the actual pages are overwhelmingly pale blues!  There are still bits of red left over, but when I was planning things out I kinda expected to go in a redder/pinker direction than I did?

Lineart was one of the last few steps to completion - once it was done, all I had left to do was some fairly basic shading and the drawing part of the project was done.  The final step though, had to be visual re-balancing.  Not everything worked entirely the way it did in the original (hand-written!) thumbnail sketches, so I put a little time aside to tweak things and re-balance each page a little.

I'm fairly pleased with how this project came out, and I actually really like the visual style I went for!  I probably could've done more to keep things consistent (the lighting varies a lot from panel to panel for example), but overall I'd say this was a success and definitely want to try more things like this in the future!  If you have any questions I'll try my best to answer them :-)