Zines & more zines - Maggie Watson

This week: Folding zines & October art challenges.

Zine titled 'this time we sent poets' by Maggie Watson lying on a backdrop image of the moon. The cover features the 'Earthset' image from artemis ii of a crescent earth behind the edge of the moon.

Not as much art to show off this week, as I've spent most of my time prepping for A2CAF. More thoughts to make up for it. If you've signed up since last week, welcome! Here's last week's entry if you'd like to read it.

What I made this week

This week I folded a lot of zines!

Several stacks of folded zines on a table. Titles include this time we sent poets, spring, Look Up!, Chameleon, blue sky, and Happy Thought.

I had a decent stock of zines left over from my last zine event, but a few were running low and I have a few new ones, so lots of printing and folding. It's pretty meditative, and usually I would sit down and watch a season of TV while I fold, but this time I had some help from my lovely friend Maya!

Maya sitting at a table surrounded by partly folded zines, smiling.

Maya came over and helped me fold, and we got all the zines done in about 3 hours! (She also caught a spelling mistake in one of them—oops! I'll fix it for the next printing.) It was a wonderful afternoon, and with all the other prep I've been doing I was very grateful to be done with folding in half as much time.

I also finished the two zines I showed you last week. Here's my Artemis II zine, "this time we sent poets":

Zine titled 'this time we sent poets' by Maggie Watson lying on a backdrop image of the moon. The cover features the 'Earthset' image from artemis ii of a crescent earth behind the edge of the moon.

Open spread of the zine, featuring a photo of astronaut Christina Koch looking out the spacecraft window at the Earth. Written over the photo is her quote 'With this burn to the moon, we do not leave Earth, we choose it,' from just before the trans-lunar injection burn that committed Integrity to lunar orbit.

And here's the completed version of my Creative Commons introduction zine:

Maggie's hand holding up a zine titled 'What is the Creative Commons and how can I use it to make stuff? an introduction for creatives'

Maggie's hand holding up the Creative Commons zine, open to a page explaining the different CC license terms.

This is licensed under CC 4.0 BY-SA, which if you read the zine you'll know means it can be copied and modified for free, as long as you credit me for the original and share it under the same Creative Commons license! You can download the print file from my website here (and email me if you'd like an editable version).

That's about it! When this email goes out I'll be on my way to A2CAF—I look forward to seeing some of you there!

What I'm thinking about

The start of October, the season of a thousand creative prompt challenges, really snuck up on me. Because of Inktober and its many offshoots, a lot of artists are following daily or daily-ish art challenges this month. I am terrible at daily art challenges (this is honestly one of the main reasons I decided to start a weekly newsletter) and yet I always find the peer pressure motivating and want to join in.

I've been thinking a lot about what a consistent art practice might look like for me, someone who has never managed to "make art every day" for more than about a week, and what role monthlong challenges like this could play in that. The commitment to making lots of art, within certain restrictions, for a set period time, really appeals to me. I did National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo, a commitment to write a 50,000 word novel in November) about five times as a teenager, mostly hitting about 25-30k but one year completing the full fifty thousand. I know I can have a big creative output under time constraints.

The expectation to make and/or post something complete every day, on the other hand, doesn't work for me. And another thing I know about myself is that anything I'm going to be doing even daily-ish needs to feel manageable, or I simply will not do it. Which means making either intentionally "unfinished" work, or finished work that's really, really small. (When asked to do something creative every day for a semester in college, I took one photo out my dorm window every day.) (And I still didn't actually do it every day.)

With that in mind, I've been considering a more NaNoWriMo style challenge, where I set a goal to complete by the end of the month at my own pace rather than finishing something every day. I've also been thinking about Artist Trading Cards, trading-card sized pieces of artwork which I've made a couple times to trade them through the mail in a swap run by @abbypainterart on instagram. Both times I treated them as something small and low-commitment and fun and had a delightful time creating them.

Maggie's hand holding a trading-card sized artwork of a telescope done in ink and watercolor. It's lit with flash to show glitter in the watercolor background and gold ink stars.

So, a tentative commitment: I'd like to make 30 small pieces of art, at ATC size, by the end of October. Any medium, any subject, any timeline, as long as they're done by the end of the month.

In an ideal world, I'd have already cut out thirty pieces of paper to the 2.5 x 3.5" dimensions and started my first one on October 1st to get the ball rolling. Unfortunately, the timing of A2CAF has put me behind schedule. In the spirit I've been trying to approach my art (and life) with lately, I will just have to accept that this will be imperfect, and start anyway.

What's next

A2CAF today, and then some rest! And then a real start on my homebrewed October art challenge, hopefully. (If you think of a snappy name for it, let me know!)

Oh, and one more thing—I went back to the pond and saw my heron friend from last week again, a little closer this time. It's all white, unlike the Great Blue Herons that usually frequent this pond, and according to an iNaturalist observation from someone else at the same pond it's probably a Great Egret! I'm planning to visit again next week with my good camera and hopefully get a much better picture to show you all.

Until then,

Maggie