KEY COLORS painted accordion Zine
Pride month! It's June, the world is bursting with color and flowers and creatures (at least here in Maine) and I was struck with the urge to PAINT!!! I had wanted to make KEY fashion zine for years, but never could quite figure out what approach I wanted to take. The colorful world inspired me: make a rainbow.
I had been itching to use my restocked gouache to paint for months, and wanted to use this an an exercise in drawing directly with paint: no sketches or pencils, just build form with color. It ended up being challenging to abandon line-based drawing but was so fun and exciting, I painted for four solid days to finish it. It was a cool process, so here's how it progressed.
I started by poring over reference images and calculating the size and shape of the thing. Always trying to be frugal, I aimed for a standard paper size and landed on 18 inches wide, then figured out how I would divide that up into eight panels- not the standard spectrum OR pride rainbow, but the eight colors of outfits I wanted to paint, because I'm queer and it's pride month so I can do whatever I want.
I loosely sketched the design based on the outfits I'd decided on, and then went into my storage closet to pull out a gigantic roll of arches paper because if I wanted full bleed on my 18 inch painting, I'd need to cut something down since none of my painting pads were bigger than 18 inches. I'm a fool, but I'm also prepared and have 20 years worth of art supplies, so it all works out.
Once I had my paper taped and measured, I again loosely sketched the poses I planned to paint. Then I covered them up with background colors (I swear by not working on a white ground!) and sketched in the poses with paint.
I was off to a pretty good start: red would be the iconic puffy fashion from the BAD LOVE music video, and orange the bemulleted patterned sweater Key from the I Wanna Be music video. Yellow was harder to choose, since he's got a lot of great yellow looks, but FACE was my first Key album and so that puffy jacket from the FACE album promos had to be it. It was at this point that I realized I was painting way outside my originally intended trim area (by a whole extra inch on all sides- see the sneakers lovingly rendered fully outside the trim line) and I decided it was fine, it would just be a taller zine.
Next were the lime (chartreuse, if we're being insufferable about color) and green, and where I immediately realized expanding the trim meant I would need to paint the pants of outfits I didn't have reference for. I flipped through some performance videos to try and find at least the approximate idea of what the pants looked like and it was fine. Though I was also looking at a LOT of empty space above his head. But you know, that can be a problem for later Kori. Love to leave myself a little design puzzle as a treat. *imagine a skull emoji here*
Lime was another outfit from I Wanna Be, and green was the villain outfit from the Gasoline promotion videos and album pictures.
Teal is where we hit a wall. For this color, I wanted to paint his iconic blue sweater worn in the SHINee World IV concert performance of VIEW. While it's mostly iconic for the fact that the sweater slides off his shoulder halfway through the performance (considered a wardrobe malfunction because it showed much more skin than Key generally did) I thought it would be prudent to pick a pose with the sweater on as intended. His hat also fell off during the dance, so I thought rendering a pose from earlier in the performance would represent the outfit as he intended.
But I...hated how it was turning out. The other colors had gone pretty smoothly, but this painting made him look so old and nothing like him. I broke stride and started on the violet outfit, thinking I could go back to teal with fresh eyes later. But I only proceeded to get very angry at the constitution of Holbein Gouache color G583, Cobalt Violet, because it was soooo plasticky. I couldn't get it to blend smoothly, so now I was very cranky, and decided to put the painting aside and play Minecraft for the rest of the night. (It was a good decision.)
The next day, after some consultation with friends, I decided to scrap the whole teal attempt and embrace the shoulder.
Some of the problem I was having, I think, was that until the teal pose, I was working from set and studio photos and videos- images from carefully lit music videos and photography sessions. The good and dramatic lighting meant I had a better grasp on the shapes of the face and how to represent them with color. But for the teal image, I was working from screenshots of a concert, and the stage lighting really flattened him out. I was then over-rendering the little contrast I could find on his face and it was all looking gnarly. So I gave myself permission to paint from the most dimensional pose I could find where he was making a less intense face. The ideal image was an exposed-shoulder shot so you know what? Why not commemorate the iconic moment. I was pleased with the result.
Lastly, purple! One of my favorite outfits, it's the sparkly purple pirate outfit from Atlantis. I hoped to use a shot from the music video as reference, but couldn't find a good pose so I took screenshots from a stage performance and found a pose I liked. I was relieved to end on a note that felt successful because I loved how it came out. Peek also at how much viscosity testing I was doing in the margins on the tape because I was continuing to fight with the cobalt violet trying to get it to mix nicely. Yeesh. Do I have to go buy some ancient arsenic-filled purple paint or what
I ended up mounting it, tape and all, to some black cardstock because I rather liked the reminder of the process in the margins.
Not shown here is the process of drawing the black cords that are attached to the wrists of the red Bad Love outfit. I was going to add them in post because they were going to go in front of the orange and yellow outfits a bit, and I wanted some freedom to play with how they'd land without messing up the underpainting. My spouse suggested I extend the cords through the entire piece, which was genius: I could use them to unify the piece AND fill some of that blank background and leg space that was a bit less intentional. The problem past Kori left for future Kori was solved!
I drew the cords with a brush pen on vellum, and inserted them into the scanned piece in Photoshop. I sent the piece off for a test print, and spent the night figuring out how I wanted to fold, assemble, and finish the piece.
While the extra vertical space was fine, the extra horizontal canvas gave me a few problems. Since I didn't want to cut off Key's hand (which, again, I had painted a full inch outside of my original crop line...yeesh...) I had to print on 24 inch wide paper to accommodate the full 19.5 inch final artboard (so much for being efficient.) Then, how would that extra half inch work with the accordion fold? I first tried just leaving the front and back covers a little extra long and said 'whatever' about it, but then I thought more about how to incorporate the title and credits and decided on an additional fold with an endpaper backing. I could print this at home with my black and white printer on colored cardstock and glue it to the covers. It turned out great. I secured it with a hot pink cardstock band (Key's signature color!) and we were DONE.
Here are the final product photos!
I hope you enjoyed this journey as much as I did. You can buy a copy if you want from my webshop, where I sell a bunch of other (less intensive and far cheaper!!!) zines as well.
Happy pride!
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