For this Zine Project, I wanted to communicate different divine feminine aspects of our world. I started out with an idea to connect different female figures from renaissance paintings to animals. This connection between the woman and the creature would represent different divine beings, and more specifically, a particular trait or theme that they both symbolize. I began this project in Photoshop. I cropped out the figure of Venus from the famous painting Birth of Venus and played around with different sea-themed backgrounds. Since the goddess of love was depicted standing inside a shell, I thought of sea creatures that could be her sort of spirit animal. I scrolled on Pinterest and found a photo of a beta fish, looking rather elegant. I positioned them facing one another on different sides of the page to show how they mirror one another. This image was to represent the connection between Venus, the Beta fish and the sea, and each of their divinity. This page’s theme was Fertility.
I continued this process of finding a feminine figure, an animal, and a setting and pinning them together via Photoshop. I realized that if I continued to use only renaissance figures, my work would be mostly showcasing white, western, idealized forms. I decided to try to find more diverse woman.
When I had six Photoshopped collages I realized that I did not want to change them in Illustrator. Instead, I was going to attempt to highlight the females and their animal counterparts to emphasize their connection. I made replicas of each finished collage by digitally drawing the figures. These images in Illustrator acted like an answer key about the most important elements of the collages.
