http://www.theworldsbestever.com/category/zines/
This is a zine that I found online. It focuses on graffiti that isn’t quite finished. I have included this zine so that I can see different ways of laying out a zine and make appropriate decisions based on my research as to how I want to lay out my zine.
Along side my portfolio I would like to hand in a zine as well. This is to potentially use to hand out at my exhibitions. A zine is a quick and easy way to showcase a lot of my work with it still looking effective. Due to this I decided to do some research into zines that already exist. Below I have included an article from Dazed and Confused magazine.
OK, so perhaps the idea of the zine, at least in the traditional sense, runs inherently counter to that of a top ten list. Small-circulation independent magazines thriving at the local level, distributed by word of mouth and happenstance – ranking them seems a bit ruthless, not to mention impossible.
And in an age when great swathes of humanity can be summarized in a hashtag, it’s unclear what even counts as a zine anymore. Where the Doc Marten-wearing enthusiast of yesteryear depended on chance discoveries in their local independent bookstore, coffee shop or illegal underground roller disco/feminist artist collective, her contemporary counterpart can do a little Googling and have myriad beautiful independent magazines delivered directly to their door – or just scroll through their Tumblr feed for a few hours. Here are ten that caught our eye recently.
The illuminati Girl Gang
A feminist zine that manages to harken to its riot grrl roots while maintaining a twenty-first-century vision (and social media presence), IGG publishes art and writing and aims to act as an oasis in the dick-desert that is publishing today. There’s a reason we’ve mentioned them before.
Pogo’s Berlin-based small-run publishing operation ‘believes in a future printed on paper’. Published in August, his ‘Archives’ series – five Risograph issues each printed in a batch of 100 – juxtaposes history with history to construct a visual narrative that is itself reminiscent of a past in print.
Reading someone else’s email – not that we would ever – is at once both heart-racingly illicit and surprisingly boring. Like Miranda July’s We Think Alone project, Post Comment Below’s Kelli Miller and Kendra Eash curate others’ virtual interactions to create a striking, funny and very real picture of communication in the Internet age. Issue #3, Sex, Drugs and Robots, came out in July.
Rigorous research, design and editorial vision – doesn’t sound that sexy, but human details peek through the crisp layout. Although production is Tokyo-based, editors Yoshi Tsujimura and Cameron Allan McKean deny Too Much is anything but international. Bonus: their tagline, ‘Romantic geography’, looks great on a t-shirt. 
Some literary journals look like shit; this one doesn’t. Issue 6, due out between the end of September and the beginning of October, comes in seven different versions, each edited by a pair of editors who were strangers until they united over themes like endlessness and the ‘shapes of words’.
Arty photos grapple with aesthetic issues, but sometimes you want ‘jokes and blokes’ alongside your socio-historical cultural critique. Pink Mince is the best kind of DIY – the kind that looks really good – and each issue consistently balances the sassy with the serious to examine its theme from all angles.
This might not be a zine—its editors don’t know either. The full-colour, large format free-for-all is packing big names (from Chloe Sevigny to Joan Crawford) and does whatever it feels like, calling itself an ‘object’ and maintaining a commitment to ownership and materiality.
Illustration without intention can sometimes seem cutesy. The bi-annual Limner Journal and its publisher Studio Operative want to change this. Since we last saw them at the South East London Zine Fest, the editors at Limner have been busy fostering discourse on illustration theory, practice and education.
The Pentaprism series from zine-turned-publisher Hamburger Eyes collects work from 18 photographers and ‘image makers’ to push the limits of both the zine and the black-and-white photo, ideally making the viewer question both the image itself and how to interact with it.
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/17205/1/top-ten-zines
Kiss and Make-up
With her totally tropical name and her uncanny resemblance to Lola – the animated Angelina Jolie-voiced fish from Shark Tale – Isamaya Ffrench was always supposed to be a star. She’s appeared in Nathaniel Mellors’ unsettling art film Ourhouse and worked as a Living Polo TV presenter, she dances with the bombastic Theo Adams Company and, aside from all that, she’s transforming make-up into a psychedelic art form. It all started in the city’s primary schools. “When I moved to London,” says Isamaya, “I was face painting just as a means to make money, working at children’s parties and that kind of thing. I’m very lucky, my niece and nephew live close by, so I started doing their school fetes and eventually word-of-mouth got around. I remember all these crazy places that I was cycling to, that I didn’t know about. I worked out London from face painting jobs!” From the smallest parties in happy family flats to super sweet kids’ extravaganzas with Shetland ponies walking around the house, and from covering S.C.U.M in cracked clay to transforming a naked Playboy Bunny into a Halloween pirate, Isamaya’s painted everywhere. “I’ve always been interested in make-up and faces,” she says. “It was a natural thing that came from this obsession with people and characters.” For our shoot on the streets of Hackney, Isamaya magics up pastoral autumnal landscapes on our models’ faces.
Photography William Seldon
Make-up Isamaya Ffrench
Isamaya Ffrench is one of the brightest talents of her generation. The Cambridge born, London based make-up artist has been wowing i-D for the past three years, transforming models’ faces into kaleidoscopic dreamworlds, and mixing her interests in art and mycology to stunning effect. Here she reinterprets spring/summer 14’s hottest trends in subtle and fresh cosmetics on Codie Young.
Isamaya Ffrench is more than just a make-up artist, she’s one of a new breed of hugely talented young creatives coming out of London right now. Originally from Cambridge, Isamaya has danced for the Theo Adams Company and designed window displays for Galeries Lafayette and Liberty. Now she’s dreaming up game shows, painting masks and writing fantastical films, all at the age of 24! Meet the girl with the beauty world at her finger tips.
I studied Art at Chelsea and Product Design at Saint Martins, and I face-painted on the side to make a bit of cash. John Colver [stylist] caught wind of what I was doing, and he told Christopher Shannon about it, who invited me to do the make-up at his spring/summer 11 menswear show. This was my first instance of face-painting in a fashion environment and I found it really fun. It encouraged me to pursue make-up professionally. Around that time I also worked with Matthew Stone for i-D [The Hedonist Issue, No. 313, Summer 2011]. We shot a story with Alek Wek, so we decided to turn all the guys into clay sculptures. Athough I was using heavy materials like clay and paint at the time, the shoot started my progression from art into make-up.
That Christopher Shannon show make-up is already so iconic…
Chris’ clothes are pretty sporty, so outdoor landscapes came to mind. It was quite an outside-the-box idea, but we decided it would be cool to paint landscapes onto all the male model’s faces. We looked at images of night skies, tropical scenes, waterfalls… I love working with nature and organic things, it’s what I love the most.
“I love things that are a bit off, a bit rough around the edges. I don’t like retouching. Mistakes make things human. We live in this weird age where everything is virtually manipulated to make it perfect, I’m happy to challenge that.”
Someone told me you like cutting down trees for fun?
Noooo! I like coppicing, which is really important for the regeneration of woodlands. Basically, we’ve evolved with the forests into a symbiotic relationship, coexisting together. Woods are really dense, therefore to introduce life and invigorate the natural environment you have to clear areas. You’ve got to chop out big areas of woodland so that the sunlight can reach the floor, and butterflies can fly through and pollinate, otherwise it would just rot and die. Over hundreds of years this has come to be the way we work as humans with the environment. Also, if you cut specific trees down they actually branch out and regrow with two trunks; it’s all for their benefit, I’m not into cutting down trees in the name of lols!
Where do you go coppicing?
In Kent. I don’t do it regularly, but it’s a pretty nice thing to do. Again, it’s that idea of reconnecting and understanding where your influences and colours really come from. It’s so inspiring: green and blue, yellow and red. It’s best to copy what works naturally. My sister’s built a yurt in the middle of this wood and we stay there. Maybe you should come?
Yes, I’d love to. When I was younger I used to go out into the countryside a lot, on my own, looking for mushrooms. I’d take trains out into the middle of nowhere.
Did I show you my fungi blog?! I think if I wasn’t doing make-up I’d probably be a mycologist, which is studying fungi. Fungi are going to save the world. Fungi are the major decomposers of the world, of this mass build-up of carbon and all this shit and decay, they’re the in-between state of life and death. At Fukushima, scientists were trying to uncover a way of dealing with the nuclear waste that had spread out into the ground, and they found a specific fungus that metabolises or breaks down radioactive elements. So the fungi are like networks of tiny threads beneath the soil, and the mushrooms are like their fruit – like your genitals, basically – and what happens is these spores suck up all of this radioactive waste and you’re left with a very radioactive mushroom, and the soil around has been neutralised, which is amazing! Maybe you cut the mushroom up and you burn it, but the point is that you preserve the soil, and that’s the beginning stages of life. I think fungi are particular organisms that we can learn a lot from. They’re constantly working out how to thrive in catastrophic scenarios, and we are the most catastrophic thing on this planet.
“Imperfections evoke an emotional response. That’s what I’m after. That’s what art is all about.”
Cool. What was the idea behind you i-D story?
It’s a collaboration between Harley Weir, Julia Sarr-Jamois and myself. Harley’s got a strong aesthetic. I like that she shoots real people, all her portraits are very believable. So I wanted it to look a bit off, a bit rough around the edges. I like things not too retouched, I like mistakes because it makes it look more human. We live in this weird age where everything we create is virtually manipulated to become aesthetically perfect, and I’m happy to challenge that. Mistakes and imperfections evoke an emotional response, whether it’s good or bad, that’s what I’m after, that’s what art should be about! I was having a conversation with Josh [Isamaya’s assistant] the other day about how people will look back upon this age, and he said something very interesting. He said, “We’re living in the last springs of life. We don’t have anything to worry about, it’s the last years of carefreeness, of this dream-like state that we’re all in. These are the years we all indulge. We can’t buy houses, our jobs are up in the air, everyone’s just floating in this soup, then it’s all going to go poof! And we’re going to have to learn how to clean up our messes”
http://i-d.vice.com/en_gb/read/interviews/2393/isamaya-ffrench
Text Dean Kissick
Photography Harley Weir
Styling Julia Sarr-Jamois
Natasha Young 