So anyone who has ever glanced at this blog knows that, next to textiles, my favourite thing is paper. Paper, paper, paper, in all it’s glorious forms!
I got chatting about paper again today with a lovely girl I just met from Hungary. Johanna is an illustrator, living and creating in Brussels. We got chatting about our love of paper and I remembered of the paper projects I want to get working on. One that I’ve been toying with for ages is making another zine! In addition to my lovely chat with Johanna, I came across the below flyer for a zine workshop for kids during the summer in Brussels. Lucky kids!!
I. Love. Zines.
I’m actually watching a Skillshare class right now about making zines! If you use Skillshare check it out – Kate Bingaman-Burt, Making Your First Zine.
I have made only one zine to date but I loved it. I only made about 30 copies and most of these I sent to people who contributed to it. I made that zine with the same approach I use for everything – bringing community together! I asked some friends and some great artists that I met online to contribute to it, and of course, because I’m surrounded by wonderful people, they all came through for me. It didn’t take so long to pull it together, and I loved the experience of piecing it, shaping it and printing. I was very lucky to have a contribution from the queen of zines herself – Linda Tieu! Her illustrations are just gorgeous and she’s of the firm belief that anyone can draw. She produces zines to encourage us scardey cats to pick up a pen and get to it!
In Tokyo we visited a shop that both sold zines and had free ones to take away. As you can imagine, not only were there great zines, but they were Japanese! There’s something about Japan’s creative world that makes me want to give up on European life and move there and live in an osana, slowly boiling while watching the Japanese world revolve around me.
I also found a shop in Amsterdam a couple of years ago selling all types of self-published work by contemporary artists and I picked up some wonderful pieces there. Here’s a pic of two of these. The smaller one, by an artist called Brah Yak, is one of the nicest paper paper pieces I have in my collection. I can’t find anything about the artist online but the piece is a gorgeous little story called Passport to Heaven. The shop is called Boekie Woekie and is well worth a visit if you’re ever in Amsterdam!
Continuing my paper-love story, I recently took a skillshare class on travel posters. I’ve been thinking a lot about Brussels and how awesome it is as a creative city. I wanted to create a poster to reflect that. This below is a prototype which is based on all the flyers for events that I had lying around the house. It’s not the final version but I’m going to get a high quality print of the Mannekin Pis picture and use that as the base for the final version. This is just a draft that I use as my front-page link for my Creative Brussels page here on the website.
The other paper project I worked on recently is a series of old postcards of Antwerp, with updated captions. The idea came from an article I was reading in the new York Times on the “muslimification” of European cities. There was a photo in the article, with a misleading and factually incorrect caption, just put there to serve the purpose of their biased view. It was galling. So I played around with the idea and created this series of postcards. It’s another idea I’m going to explore some more over the summer.
Ideas, ideas! Bouncing around in there, I need to nail them down…
Speaking of paper work – I had my first encounter today with Belgian Revenue… Ugh…
So, I have info coming very soon on the jewellery workshop update. IF you weren’t able to make the first date we offered, put a Save the Date in your diary for Sunday 21 June. More info this weekend!! Hope to see some of you very soon!
a x
