work station!!

messy but working

Made a “pen” using a skewer, a cork and a rubber band. Fully adjustable,

My zine focused on sustainability in graphic design. My interviewee Eric Benson promotes and teaches sustainable design, and will be someone whose guides and resources I continue to utilise in the future.

I believe in the re-purposing and reusing of items over recycling. My zine reflects this in that it is a book, a poster, sow-able seeds, compostable and recyclable. I think the onus should not always fall on the consumer to be sustainable. As designers, we have a responsibility to create things that are quality, long-lasting and When we design, the end of an item's life cycle is as important if not more, that its beginning in the distributing shop. It is important for sustainable design to be considered for every designed project. It needs to be a given, not a niche.

Natural decorations

I'm experimenting with pressed flowers, and using them as a natural and aesthetic adornment for my zine. Whilst I've heard of this practice before, this is my first time trying it myself.

leaf printing

I trialled a variety of leaves and natural inks. Beetroot juice was the most successful, and to my surprise the majority of the leaves did not yield a desirable result. The ones with thick veins worked well, as the beetroot juice is not as viscous as paint. 

To make the beetroot ink I boiled chopped beetroots and blended it into a puree. It was then strained and became ready to use.

TEA AND COFFEE:

I was confident in the success of coffee and tea as inks. I had previously seen artists use them as paint to create amazing work.

I used strong black tea and espresso, yet the colours were still quite light. Through my experimentations I found that these 'inks' could be layered in a similar way to watercolour. To write the text I used a thin bamboo skewer, to maxmise legibility whilst pertaining to the natural and sustainable theme. The blackberry 'ink', whilst proving unsuccessful in printmaking, seem to be a great natural alternative to the popular blue pen.

Leaf Printing: Blackberry

Blackberry juice seems to consist of water and flecks of blackberry. 

This created rather unclear leaf patterns. Will trial this method with beetroot 

INK-MAKING: BERRIES

For my sustainable zine, I trialled blackberry and raspberry ink.

I mashed the berries, and used a chopstick to write text using the juices.

After heating the blackberries, it became red? Which was bizarre and unexpected. 

VEG INKS for ZINE

part 1: beetroot

In keeping with the sustainability theme, I got my hands dirty (or stained with beetroot juice at least) making ink out of natural ingredients.

A really effective technique was using cookie cutters to cut out raw beetroot shapes. Their natural flexibility is similar to rubber, being hard and soft. 

This allowed them to be used as stamps, self-inking ones too!

I also tried to make abstract patterns, by repetition of simple shapes like small rectangles. I cut a piece of thin, paint brush-like beetroot and drew lines that mimicked a wood grain. I also tried scoring the beetroot with a knife, then using the ink that seeped out of the cuts to produce a grid-like pattern. These techniques could make decorative or informative pictures for my zine.

beetroot juice was trialled at many different stages of rawness/processed state. -raw -boiled for a short time -boiled for a long time -stick blended and strained

I found that whilst they all seemed vibrant and legible when wet, the stick blended and strained method produced the most concentrated ink. The other variants tend to soak through the paper and bleed more, as they contain more water. Although as I became more familiar with the medium the quality also improved, for example I learnt to write in a fast joined writing so that the juice will not gather in one place and soak through the paper.