Today I continued with the research. I browsed though Etsy's zine section today and picked out a few things that I liked. Here are a few of my favorites (the rest are under my Zine delicious bookmark - which I think will become extremely helpful as this project continues):
This is My Boyfriend - cool illustrations with hand-drawn text
Lil' Laundromatic Zine - more design oriented
Life on Earth - interesting ink lines
Lickety Split - two color illustrations
Dead Letters and Rare Words - screenprinted cover (something that might be possible since I'm taking Printmaking II next semester with a focus on Serigraphy)
TAGS - based off of photos
Doodle Zine - a book of doodles
From the Ground Up - one of my favorites, I actually own a copy of this one. Lots of little drawings
White Rice Fish - block printed cover
Butts - an entire zine about butts
Art Bureau - beautiful illustrations
Hairstylist - asks the reader to interact with the illustrations
The Little Classic Sneaker Coloring Book - interesting binding method
Poor Traits - humor
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To show a bit of what I've done before, here's a page from the last book that I made:
When I made the book I wanted to practice creating vector images, but I only ended up with 6 little images; not because I didn't want to do more, but because they took me forever. I wasn't really sure how to go about doing stuff like this, so I used some kind of crazy system where I livetraced everything (gasp!) and then cleaned up everything by hand adding extra points with the pen tool and whatnot. It didn't look too bad in the end, but it was a pretty long and laborious process, each thing taking me a couple of days.
Here's another drawing that I made into a vector image in kind of the same fashion more recently. This also took me way longer than it should have:
Original sketch
Vector
I've got a couple sketchbooks full of doodles like these, I always try to finish a sketchbook when I travel, and I've always wanted to do more with them, so this book should be a good chance. I think the tool that'll be most helpful in this circumstance is the brush tool within Illustrator. I haven't gotten the chance to trace one of these drawings with this method yet, but I have to imagine that it will be siginificantly faster. I could also see how overlaying textures could make some of these more interesting, so the research I've done of the past couple of weeks on texture websites will come in handy as well.
Here are a few good (i.e. free/hi-res) ones that I've stumbled across:
cgtextures.com - textures for almost anything you can think of
lovetextures.com - pretty new, but what they've got is good
hiresolutiontextures.com - a texture blog of sorts
texturewarehouse.com - tons of different categories
-- more to come --
Great research! I should hope that new techniques you have learned will speed things up. Another idea is that you don't bother redrawing very much and just work with the scans from your sketchbook. You could mix in digital originals for contrast and interest.
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