Month: November 2016

It Will Be Okay
MissMuffcake

www.missmuffcake.etsy.com

It Will Be Okay is a mini-zine featuring quotes and drawings to give you a positive boost to your moment, your day… It’s definitely adorable, as you can imagine, but with a quote from Ice Cube tucked in there along with one piece of “adult language”, it’s not quite for the very young. (Unless you’re cool with that.)

I like that things are facing different directions (nothing is upside down, though), so you don’t just flip through this. That might not be another person’s thing, but something that gets me to interact more with a zine that I might otherwise quickly go through is a good thing.

Stickers and drawings definitely add to the fun vibe, but I think this added extra, something to physically ‘take away’ from the zine wraps it up perfectly:

That, my friends, is an itty bitty button/badge that you can take out of the zine and put anywhere you please. I absolutely adore it.

I hate to list any nitpick with a zine that is created with such positivity, but I do have to mention… While Missmuffcake does put a name down on the back, there aren’t any other sorts of contact details or a shop URL… But, a name like Missmuffcake makes the Google search a much easier one than searching by zine title, so it’s practically not a search at all. 

Even so, now you have the link above, and I have this lovely mini-zine (with button/badge!) to put in my forever collection.

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Little side note: I’ve hit a point where people have started sending me zines specifically for review. Because of that, I’m creating and trying to maintain a queue so it’s all fair as far as timing goes. That being said, today’s zine, yes, skipped the queue. It’s been a hard week for so many reasons both personal and on larger scales, so I wanted to review a zine that had a message I really needed to hear today. I promise to keep deviations from the queue to a minimum.

Sketchbook 1
Scheree Reeves
http://www.scheree.com/

I’ve always admired people’s ability to draw well. When I was growing up, it seemed like such a magical talent to have. To see things like Sketchbook 1 where some drawings are ‘broken down’ into the individual strokes of linework makes is all the more fascinating…

Sketechbook 1 is just that – a sketchbook of sorts featuring all sorts of Scheree Reeve’s pieces at various stages of completion. There are ‘rougher’ (I say rougher, but they’re gorgeous by their own right) pieces as well as a full colour, completed centrefold. When it comes to what’s drawn, there’s a lovely variety: from humans to animals and creatures between.

Really, though, when it comes down to it, I think I would have enjoyed it just as much with less variety.

This zine is beautifully presented on heavier, glossier paper that suited the completed pieces very, very well. It was a little strange to see the ‘rougher’ sketches on such nice paper, but not to an extent that it took away from the enjoyment of it. For the overall zine, it was a good choice.

An even better choice? The fact that everything is in full colour. From lines to completed pieces, having full colour really breathed life into everything that I think black and white would have fallen short with.

This is the kind of zine that’s easy to flip through or dwell on depending on your mood. I can see myself going back to this and looking through it many more times simply for the pleasure of it.