Part 2 — Artistry and problem solving go hand-in-hand

Months went by. The zine throwaway comment was unfulfilled until one fateful day, July 12 2025, thanks to cryskir's Chris Hemsworth zine Rachel saw on IG. On that day, the zine became a real project.

Like every project, there's a lot of fucking around before any actual assembly happens. The professional terminology is research and development. We knew we wanted to print on risograph with a limited color palette and we knew we wanted to take advantage of the physical medium of zines but everything else was unknown.

In our first official zine meeting, we discussed being very inspired by birding illustrations. We decided to dedicate time to drawing birds in different physical mediums, recruiting friends and family to also make illustrations. We gave special attention to chalk and crayons as homage to the crayon box in the birding kit.

We illustrated for months and in August we met again. Rachel pitched the narrative of two inexperienced birders speaking with unearned authority, until, of course, that authority becomes real once they crack open a book. In this new AI-world, we both found the heroic field guide moment hysterical. Pulling inspo from works like Troubled Birds and False Knees, we landed on an irreverent tone with beautiful illustrations to deliver a whimsically absurd narrative.

As digital designers in our day job, we wanted to take advantage of the physicality of zines and encourage a real 'touch-nutrient dense mud' moment. We were very inspired by the zines created by melfic, particularly the moth zine. We wanted our readers to visually and physically experience the awe we felt when watching a cormorant dive into water.

In October we finally landed on our zine format, a T-cut zine Sana learned about in a bookbinding class. The big draw of the T-cut was playing with orientation, aka we could have a centerfold. Boom! Diving cormorant was a go.

In the same month, Sana also went to a risograph collage club and got hands-on riso experience. The class introduced a program called Risofy, which cleanly converted full color images to a pre-selected riso palette. This solved one of our biggest problems.

Our illustrations were all beautiful but not visually consistent. Originally, we were intending to redraw everything in a cohesive style. Now, we decided using collage would capture the whimsical absurdity better AND printing the collages with riso would save us time in digitally color correcting.

And besides, riso collages are sick as fuck (objective truth).

By mid October, we were ready to make the zine a reality. We checked our calendars and decided to meet up Halloween weekend (Spoiler alert, this was ALSO foreshadowing).