Final task:
When making my zine I didn’t think too deep about what I was doing and why I just wanted to create a piece of work which is fun and light hearted and will hopefully will make someone smile.
The context of the story is a young person tackling the challenges of life. None of my characters are real, all are just a representation of people. Ruth is a representation of a quirky young girl at that young age of self-belief before getting older and starting to question her ability. As a kid she thinks she is always right, she knows what she is doing, she has a naive idealistic positive approach to life that young children can have and she isn’t phased by having a cactus for a friend. The intention is to give a positive image and this idea was inspired by the work I do with young children at Fulford beavers scouts.
This zine was low budget. Hopefully received with humour
The language is universal and suitable for all so there is no bad language and the writing is simple. The subject matter is varied and a little strange. There isn’t meant to be any significant meaning behind any of it like the social challenges of young people. It was meant to be fun and just highlight some of the humorous comments and ideas they have about life.
Reflecting on the context now I realise that all the characters in my zine are white. This wasn’t a deliberate decision it was just because of the style of drawing in that the people are just outlines of a drawing on paper. Because of the style if I was going to draw an Asian child they would probably appear the same but with black hair. They are just characters in a story, I wasn’t purposefully excluding black/Asian children. when I was making the characters I wasn’t picturing them as white they are just outlines and the only coloured parts are there clothes and hair. There is no colour representation in my zine although some elements give off a certain image about the characters (bright colour for the art teacher lively, pink for the little girl because she is a little girl, light blue for Ruth because she is neat) Also there are no children in my zine with a clear disability. This is because again, it didn’t occur to me to make a distinct difference between people because it had no relevance to the story if the character was disabled or not. The characters that are included could be disabled but could be sitting down so you wouldn’t know or it could be non-physical disability.
On reflection I may have used the stereotype of a bossy girl. If the main character was a boy I probably wouldn’t have represented him in this way. This is probably because of my exposure to represented images of gender, The bossy girl, The hyperactive boy, The calm mum, The boring dad, The sweet friend, The crazy art teacher. In some ways her bossy dominant character could be a negative thing but I you can’t dislike her, even if at times she may be annoying or bossy and you are slightly laughing at her, her intentions are genuinely good and she has a sort of force of life in her that is likeable.