Forest Lore
An Adventuring Guidebook Zine
This is Forest Lore, a brief field guide written by the fictional, but very wonderful, Penny Rivera. As an expert explorer herself, she is familiar with the wild magics and odd rules that belong to magical forests.
This zine set includes the Forest Lore zine, a set of 3 cards, a small print, and a dozen stickers. If you’re interested, you can purchase a set on my shop! Or, keep reading to learn more about the project. 😀
If you’re interested in buying this zine set – check out my etsy!
Behind the Zines
Now for those of you nerds that like to get a peek behind the curtain of what I did to put this together I’ve made a little blog post for you. Before you dive in, yes. I know. I completely missed at least 1 or 3 typos in the finished zine. I have considered going in and fixing it, just haven’t gotten around to it yet. This is why you hire editors kids!!! You may think yourself immune to that sort of thing but trust me no one is above making a typing error. Of course, there may be any number of typos in this blog post as well, but well I don’t have time to fix everything now do I? Enjoy! 😀
How I put it all together
As a kid, there was a movie (which I refuse to name,) that I enjoyed quite a bit where the protagonist has to find a mystical item called the Book of Forest Lore. Of course, being who I am, the idea of an enchanted book filled with Something as mysterious and magical as Forest Lore absolutely enthralled me. I’m sure you can imagine my disappointment when the book turns out to be just plot-relevant commentary on the main character’s relationship status. In my humble opinion, something called the Book of Forest Lore ought to contain Lore. About the Forest. Call me crazy.
This idea was one of the first to come back to me when I began my oh-so chaotic journey of trying to figure out what the heck to do with my blossoming artistic talents. As you will see from a lot of the earlier books in this library, I had a lot of ideas. This one turned out to be one of my favorite, and one I will definitely be coming back to. I have always had a few things I care about that seem to shape where my interests pull me when it comes to working on art. I think art should be accessible to everyone, and that includes price. I really admire art that takes an out-of-the-box approach, is immersive, and encourages you to use exercise your imagination. I wanted to brainstorm ways to make products that would enrich people’s lives. I have always loved the zany scholastic (I think that’s the right publisher?) books that you could find in a lot of elementary school classrooms that featured encyclopedias on whimsical topics. Dragonology is an oft-remembered and very popular one. With these concepts as my guidelines, I think I did pretty okay executing my immersive, whimsical, accessible art collection. I would love to do something like this again sometime soon.
(right) I ended up going for a slightly different design for the Zine cover. (You can see in the photo of the collection above.) Instead of a seal I hand carved a stamp and used gold metallic ink.
I started with the zine, starting with a layout I could fill with appropriately whimsical facts and working out from there. I came up with each creature and artifact once I had my sections planned out. I had four sections, each based around a themed area of the woods.
The design for the additional tchotchkes that come with the Zine developed as I worked on the project. I really wanted to find some way to fit the Green Man in the zine itself, but there was no way to really tie it together as neatly as I would have liked, so he became his own thing. The cards are also parts of the zine that didn’t quite fit, but do marvelously as their own thing. Everything is hand printed, bound, and assembled by me. 😀 Because I am very picky on how things turn out and am very willing to make extra work for myself. 😀 The image is a rough draft of what the final set would look like. The final art for the cards are different, and the stickers are all in a neat kraft paper pocket, but everything else is assembled very similarly to this. I am very proud of it all. 😀
Illustrating the Set
I think it is probably obvious that this was a lot of fun to work on but I’ll say it anyway. Engaging, rich art can definitely be helped by good technique, but it lives and dies by good inspiration. If you have an engaging idea that you’re interested in, it comes to life almost on it’s own. Of course, that’s not to say you can’t very clearly see a lot of amateurish mistakes. (This is not an invitation to point them out to me, by the way, trust me, I know already.) I still have a lot to learn, but I am proud of what I put together.
Of course, I also felt a lot of anxiety about this project. This is one of the first of many attempts to awkwardly explore what it means to make art, more importantly, how to make art I want to sell to people. (ew. not people – selling. Ew. But a man’s got to eat!!) I felt very insecure and self conscious about each choice I made. There is a lot of corny, nerdy goodness here, and I felt very silly about it. Now, it is one of the things I’m most proud of. I look forward to doing more stuff like this in the future.
My Favorite Bits 🙂
There was a lot to love about working on this project, but there are a few things in particular that stood out as my favorites.
This lil guy is one of my favorite things I’ve ever drawn. He’s not super original, I know, but damn he’s cute.
Below is one of my favorite things I’ve ever drawn ever in my entire life. I have it everywhere. I mean it’s a magic sword what more could you possibly want?
I’ve gotta confess that I’m seeing a pattern here in what my favorites are. Only self reflection has prevented me from adding the demon cat to this stack of creatures. I guess I just love a lil guy. The Noem, as intimidating as he might seem, is definitely a lil guy.
If a spell can cause magic to happen then I’m allowed to call my magic mushroom pithy, even though curing magical bad luck has nothing to do with witty sayings. }:)
This lil guy is one of my favorite things I’ve ever drawn. He’s not super original, I know. We’ve all seen a blanket ghost. But damn he’s cute.
My zine includes four full page “spread” illustrations depicting different locations in the woods, and this one was my favorite. I am very proud of the ethereal atmosphere and the inviting glowy-ness of the water. 😀
thanks for reading!
