Game Bird Color (it's a fan art zine and I made it and I love it)

BEHOLD, GAME BIRD COLOR

I finally finished my first ever zine! It's called Game Bird Color and it's currently the only field guide to video game bird characters that I'm aware of.

Making the zine was a huge ordeal. Originally planned to be black and white sketches, I decided to color one and when I hid the lineart on Photoshop I fell in love with the solid color, lineless style and decided to make that the whole thing. The plan was to start small and draw 6 characters--just enough to get my toes wet and have a finished product to call my own. However, there are a lot of cool birds in the video game world and before I knew it the page count had more than doubled to 15 illustrations!

Then the troubles came. As I was just finishing up the zine and getting ready to lay it out and send it to the printer, I did...something with my photoshop file that ended up eating the project. All pages, gone forever. Rather than giving up (which I almost did) I redrew it, working from screenshots I had thankfully taken of some of the pages and relying on my terrible memory for the rest.

It wouldn't be a Ribbon Black project without references to games nobody but me cares about

So I finished the zine, again, and sent it to the printer. An eternity later and they come back, looking pretty damn good! Except for the artifacting, of course. I had somehow exported the pdf in a compressed form even though "Press Quality" had been selected. The artifacts are faint, but as Vanilla Ice said, "anything less than the best is a felony". Once I pulled myself from the depths of depression over that, I decided that for its flaws it's still a zine, and zines aren't supposed to be perfect. So I decided to sell it!

Game Bird Color is 15 pages, printed on nice thick glossy stock with cute hand-stitched binding by my fiance! Supplies are quite limited. If you want a copy, I have it for sale here:

Big Cartel shop (recommended as you don't need an account to purchase)

Etsy shop (more expensive because of their fees, but if you wanna use Etsy...)

I've finally made my own holiday cards

It's Beau from Animal Crossing: New Leaf! I've yet to get him in my own town, but he's one of my girlfriend's "lifers"; no moving out under any circumstances, haha. Kind of like how Jay was for me. And then the son of a bitch moved out behind my back.


Now all I need are friends to send them to! If nothing else, it makes a cute fanart. Anyone else out there make their own cards? It would be a fun project for a bunch of artists to have an exchange.

If I had thought of it earlier, maybe I could've set something up on Tumblr...

New Leaf: My First Month In Town

The Animal Crossing train keeps on rolling here--if you're watching, and you don't like AC, then I apologize and also you should like AC. I wanted to do a "serious" fanart of the game rather than the comics I've been drawing, so I did a group shot of my character and all the animals who have lived in my town (Shady) since I started about a month ago. Hope you like it, it consumed my stupid life for a couple days.

A couple of favorites:

I didn't think I'd care much for Dora (the mouse) at first, but by the time she said she was moving out she had become one of my favorites. Unfortunately I was on a trip irl and didn't get to talk to her on her last day! I felt guilty, haha.

Bruce is the deer on the top right; a "grumpy" type villager. The way he was always wandering the town with a shovel at 3 AM and living in a garage led to a running joke that he was a serial killer. He's still wandering around town at night, but he tends to be watering flowers nowadays. He always seemed like such a quiet, polite boy.