Thank you so much for having me I don't think I ever would have committed to the bit this hard without your beautiful beautiful deadlines to motivate me hehehe
I can finally share the work I did for the @encorepwease side order zine✨🐙🦑
I had the pleasure of making a page illustration that served as a homage both to the ‘Souv3nir’ in-game track AND Octo Expansion.
I also collaborated with @colourful-void and made spot art for their written piece ‘memverse_beta-test_(NOT)final’, that you can find right here .
Thank you to everyone in the zine that made this project possible, it was a joy to work with all of you!
Sharing the thumbnails and process below the cut . . . !
MAIN PIECE
Usually the first idea is rarely the one you end up going with, but after some explorations, I found that I liked it the most lol.
The whole piece had an abstract theme, which made it REALLY challenging. After all, how do you convey the feeling of a souvenir? The sort of nostalgic sliver of a ghost that clings onto the game and the track itself.
The position of each ‘souvenir’ fragment is not random. I purposely placed happier, more hopeful moments at the top, and darker ones at the bottom. This was meant to reflect the depths from which you have to climb out of difficult situations (like the deep sea metro), and the rise towards a brighter future (like with the tower of order). There’s other thoughts that went into certain details in each fragment, but I will not go into that 😂
It’s also in a way like flipping a coin, or a track. ‘Souv3nir’ in itself is the last of three songs. It represents both the initial hopefulness and the corruption of the memories as you approach the top of the tower. Hence the shattered glass fragments.
On the disk itself, I drew a little octoling life to represent Eight’s soul, and added both the memverse and the Free Association logos. The ‘Souv3nir’ title is entirely handwritten and it was a pain to get right LOL.
Lastly, it is very faint but if you look closer on the disk, you will find the original circuit pattern from the game!
SPOT ART
With Marina, I really wanted to showcase how trapped she was in her head, or a “box” of her own making (in this case the elevator). Throughout void’s piece, there’s a struggle to see past her mistakes and worries. She is distant and her judgment is clouded, she is hard to reach.
Playing with the size of the character was fun because I felt like it suggested a kind of surrealist feel to the piece, like how we might literally be in Marina’s mindscape as observers.
The jelletons were a late addition because the page felt sort of empty with just the characters. I like to think it’s them approaching to force Marina to accept her current reality and embrace it as it is.
Thanks for reading, if you took the time to listen ^^ I love talking about design and composition! Feel free to bother me in comments or asks, squid… OUT.
