Team Rocket Fanzine

Whilst scrolling on Instagram around this time last year, I noticed that one of my friends from college had started planning a fanzine for the characters from Team Rocket (Pokémon). I was really interested in this because not only I used to love watching Team Rocket get their butt kicked every time in the TV show when I was little, but it was another chance for me to gain some connections and have a more comprehensive interface with the broader world by collaborating with a variety of different artists all around the globe. Furthermore, for the zine and the merchandise for the project, most of the proceeds went to three charities: Fareshare, Wildlife Warriors & Trevor Project, whilst the rest of the donations went towards the production of the zine and merchandise.

I signed up to be a part of the zine, and with my luck, I was asked to create two sticker sheet designs for the Fanzine. This was an excellent opportunity to learn more about different compositions and see what techniques would befit the sticker sheet. I decided to go with Pokémon that the team mainly use within battle – more specifically Jessie/James' (characters that were primarily in the show). At first, it was going to be one design for the sticker sheet. However, I decided to propose an idea of illustrating two techniques, one being their regular colour scheme and the other being shiny (different colour variations). The organizers of the zine loved this idea. Therefore I decided to follow through with this idea.

Not only that but one of the artists that were supposed to be a part of the collaboration dropped out, therefore, meaning we had an artist down on drawing a page in the zine for the characters Annie and Oakley from Pokémon Heroes: Latios & Latias. I decided to offer additional work for the zine by drawing that page for the zine. This drawing is one of the best drawings that I created this year as I wanted to explore how to fill up the page more and work on my architectural drawing skills. The research was a key element to the drawing because I hadn't seen the film before or even heard of these two characters before working on the picture, so I made sure to have researched their location within the film and the character's characteristics. Not to mention their "buddy" Pokémon.

Overall, my experience throughout my time working on this project was excellent as it was my first time partaking in a fanzine, and all of the artists and organizers worked together amazingly to create products that we are all so proud of. The illustrations that I made for this project were some of my best work yet, and it is incredible to think about how people wanted to buy a product that I created. To learn from this, though, I would like to have managed my time better as some of the deadlines clashed with my university work deadlines, but thankfully they were very understanding as some of the artists within the project were students.

As of right now (November 2021 I am currently partaking in three different zines at the moment as well: creating artwork for a zine and a digital zine, as well as some digital merchandise as well. This merchandise/illustration work should be finished around March time in 2022.