You Suck at Art: a zine about perfectionism, creative burnout, and finding your way back
Sapphic Bushtit – Skylar
8 pages
https://www.instagram.com/sapphic_bushtit/
You Suck at Art is a primarily black and white, US-quarter-sized zine whose subtitle covers is better than I could in regards to what it’s about:
“a zine about perfectionism, creative burnout, and finding your way back”
You Suck at Art opens with a short note about how this zine was “Made whilst stressing TF about EBABZ2022!!!”, which I had to mention for a few reasons. One, I love a little ‘outside the zine’ content (playlists, reading lists, this zine was made whilst) in zines because it makes the whole thing all the more fun. Two, I think many zinemakers can identify with stressing before a zine event, so it made me all the more empathetic to Skylar with this zine.
We open up with a fun comic-style drawing above Skylar writing about her relationship with making art. I love how Skylar writes about not being interested in being good but rather making art for fun because I feel like that is such an important creative spark that so many of us lose along the way. Unfortunately, as life too often goes, a lot of negative factors piled up with no self-compassion to soothe things, and Skylar stopped making comics…
However, things to take a turn toward the sunshine with better times, new passions, and (big, excited fairy zine-mama noises here) zines helped bring Skylar back into the world of art.
Skylar’s art style is fun and inviting. She uses just enough detail for us to know what’s happening with a more rounded overall style that invites you to ‘step in’ to the art without it being intimidating.* It would probably be helpful to do comparisons, but I’m not sure how comfortable I am with that because I don’t want to create any sort of associations the artist may take negatively.
Overall, I think You Suck At Art is a great, short read that mixes in art with telling a story of a creative struggle that I think more creatives than not have encountered some flavour of in their lives. As someone who is slowly but surely coming back to her fiction writing and zinemaking, this was absolutely something I empathised with straight away. (Especially the negative inner critic, which I have now at least momentarily silenced with a metaphorical doughnut and new zine to read.)
I think this zine is super cute, works on all levels, and is an awesome introduction to Skylar. Definitely grab a copy of this. If and when there is more zine goodness from Skylar, I am ready and waiting for it.
Welcome to the zineverse, Skylar!
*PS. I am trying to work on how I describe art styles, but I’m very much a work in progress.