The Various Things I Eat

I made a zine out of my food journal. It's B&W, xeroxed, 28 60lb pages, 5.5"x8" with a 80 lb card stock cover. I'm going to sell it for $5. You can get it here.

I finished my food journal in February, but then got caught up with finishing other projects I couldn't get to this until last Saturday. It took a few days to draw the last bits of the zine, and then it took about two days to figure out the cover and ink it, and 4 days to ink the 28 pages inside.

I had trouble figuring out the cover, and what to call it. I settled for "The Various Things I Eat" cause it the least lamest title I came up with. I wanted the cover to be food related, but I also wanted to draw a cover that was at least kind of decent. Usually I go for really simple covers cause the insides are pretty packed, but I went opposite and decided to pack the cover up as much as possible.

I penciled out a circle and tried drawing everything I eat with out repeating anything. I do repeat 2 items, a pear, and something else I forgot. It could be a corn dog or a cola. Uh there are different types of burgers and different types of hot dogs. Like there's a pretty big difference between a Char Dog and Top Dog. And if you're ever at the Dead Mall and you see a place serving "Chicago Style Hot Dogs", don't get it. You'll be really disappointed.

This is my title page. I also went through a lot of different ideas for this page. The thing is, is that I don't really make zines like this. I usually just draw a bunch of random stuff and then bind it together, so I didn't know if I had to explain myself, like I did with my Oakland Zine. So I had several ideas. One was to NOT have a title page and add in the parts of August I left off (I left off August, cause Marci went on vacation without me, and all I ate was hot pockets, toast and water while she was gone).

Then I was going to do a tally of the food I ate, but it took so long and it got kind of confusing; do I count all my cokes, and then all the other colas, or just have a general cola list? Cause if I'd draw in either coca-cola can or a bottle of something for the tally it'd just confuse people.

And the last one was an actual introduction of my food zine. I went through several different versions, from me explaining why I drew everything I ate, to just me writing about the things I like eating and why, but yeah. I think most people who'd find this, wouldn't really need an explanation.

Uh, by default I just went with this. Which is just a line of flags and letters in a bubble. I drew in some clouds while contemplating drawing something else.

The problem with me and writing stuff out repeatedly is that I sometimes convince myself that I've been misspelling things all along. And I did that with the word "popsicle". After drawing out the word half a dozen times I convinced myself it was "popsickle". There was stuff that I always misspelled, which were agua frescas (aqua frescas) and kettle cooked chips (kettled cooked chips), which I didn't realize until redrawing it the second time around.

My biggest worry was matching up the dates, and not getting anything wrong. Luckily everything matches up. It took me an hour and a half to photo copy 1500 times on 800 pages. I only screwed up once while xeroxing, and that was cause I just zoned out. The pages are Letter size, but I trimmed a half inch at the bottom. I can sell this at $5 instead of $8 cause I'm using Letter instead of Legal, and yeah I know. No one really cares. When I did my other zine, it was really hard to find a ream of paper that was cardstock and legal, and I ended up buying a ream of 11"x17" and trimming that down. Never make a zine using Legal size paper if you want a cardstock cover. Unless you get it professionally printed.