As a music lover and a k-pop fan, korean pop music is the topic of a lot of my zines, and an excuse to try new formats and methods in my work. From 2020 through 2023 I created annual "top-10" zines including "My Top-10 Favorite SHINee Songs," "Let it Burn (2022,)" "How Bad Love Saved 2021," and "2020 Was Hell But The KPOP Was Good." Most recently, I made a zine to celebrate attending my first solo k-pop concert ("Taemotion",) consisting of drawings of Taemin's stage performances and interview quotes.
(There is a separate page on this site specifically for art and zines I've made about my favorite kpop artist, SHINee's Key. You can see those here!)
Photos, production images, and information about each of these projects are below.
Remaining copies of these zines can be purchased at my online shop here.
Taemotion is an 8 page half-letter zine created to celebrate Taemin's Ephemeral Gaze Tour stop in New York City. I created four new illustrations based on Taemin's stage performances and paired them with quotes about his work. I also made a two-block rubber print of an older drawing to make into a Valentine to give away along with it at the concert.
Photos of the complete zine and various artwork scans and work-in-progress photos are below.
My Top 10 Favorite SHINee Songs (2023) is a double-sided, letter-sized unfolding zine with handmade blue diamond stamps; in a aqua-colored cardstock slipcover with a holographic foil sticker.
Made to celebrate SHINee's 15th debut anniversary. Determining the layout of how it would unfold was the most exciting part. I created it in four days with my trusty brother B+W laser printed and whatever I could find around my studio. Watch an unfolding video here.
Let it Burn, my 2022 k-pop zine, is a 20-page, landscape-oriented half-letter zine.
It's simple, black and white digital printing on white paper with a red cardstock cover. This was an exhausting year and I wanted to try something simple, giving my attention to the illustrations and practicing my inking. I loved solving my layout problem by flipping the book horizontally!
How Bad Love Saved 2021 is an 11 x 17 inch 3x3 trifold zine screen printed with four passes.
I wanted to print this years zine in very bright colors so I could represent the bright red costume that was the centerpiece of the project, so I chose screen printing for my production method. It was a challenge, with four large screens and a medium-equipped studio, but the resulting product had a lot of handmade charm and matched my color vision perfectly. Video of handling and unfolding here.
2020 Was Hell But The KPOP Was Good is a 2.25 x 3.75 inch "trading card pack" zine. A fold out cover, secured by a sticker and house in a plastic sleeve, holds 11 individual, different-colored cardstock cards with rounded edges. Each card represents a song, with a drawing on one side and a description on the other. Some cards are hand accented with markers.
This zine was inspired by other zines by Aatmaja Pandya and Kat Leonard, who had made zines that consisted of individual sheets housed in a container. I thought that "a book doesn't need to be bound" was a great way to feel some creative freedom to customize individual pages. The "trading card" format was a lot of fun but necessitated a LOT of individual corner-rounding. It's one of my favorite pieces to date.
Miscellaneous Kpop Illustrations
A multimedia drawing of Eunhyuk (Super Junior) from his "Explorer" solo album promotions; a pencil and marker drawing of Ren and Aron from Nu'est's final "Needle and Bubble" album promotions; and an ink and marker drawing of Jun from Seventeen's "Spell" music video.
