Zined: In Her Bones

It’s been months in the making, but now that Vanessa finally is holding her beauty in her hands I can spill the beans! 2/3rds of The Zine Squad invited me to contribute to a zine specifically for Queen V herself, who is the last third of aforementioned squad. Myself, Caylee, Lauren, Julia, and Katie all worked together to create this creepy compilation.

Vanessa is an archaeologist for a living, and also has a deep connection to skeletons, bones, death, etc. It’s super amazing, and we chose to honor it with a macabre inspired zine just for her. If you don’t know Vanessa, you need to know her and her art journaling immediately. Her work is inspiring, her attitude and outlooks are encouraging and she is generally an overall amazing human. Love her to death (ha!)

Here are some of the pages I contributed for this ghostly zine.

I added the gold leaf to the front cover, especially as I worked on this a few months ago around the time I filmed my Gold Leaf Tutorial over on Get Messy. Everything is better with gold leaf!

I also just contributed the creepy blood-like drips of ink to these layouts. I’m not sure who’s pages they were originally, but I hope they didn’t mind me adding to it!

Again, I just added the tissue paper and white ink embellishments to this page (I promise I actually made some pages!) I think we wanted to collaborate more on some of these spreads, like this one, but that’s hard to communicate when you’re sending the journals around the world a couple of times!

Here is a spread I actually did all by myself! I LOVED how this turned out, and was slightly jealous it wasn’t going to stay in my collection. At least I have photographic evidence! As soon as I knew we were doing a macabre-themed zine, I instantly remembered this graphic I saw in one of my many donor magazines. It was a perfect fit.

This the last page in the journal, as well as the contributor page. I added the moon phases to the back page, since moons & ghosts & death all seem to be connected. The photograph on the left is a great one of Vanessa holding a skeleton’s hand and I used a sketchy acetate transfer method to increase the creep factor.

This anatomical heart matte medium image transfer had been kicking around in my stash for a while, and it finally found it’s home on the back of Vanessa’s zine! And some more gold leafing. Whoever added the lines was a genius too – it looks so awesome all together!

If you want to see the pages everyone else contributed and created, you can find them below at their respective spaces on the interwebz.
Lauren
Caylee
Katie
Julia

All of the ladies involved here are from the amazing Get Messy community, a program and posse of creative people where we encourage, challenge and create together. If you want to know more about it all, you can find out more here (and join us!)