Underwater worlds and soft marine shapes: Julie Legrand and Nina Izycka’s zine investigates seaweed

Over the past few years the visual artists and illustrators Julie Legrand and Nina Izycka have found quite a regular rhythm for collaborating on creative projects, developing both a close friendship and a “harmonious coexistence of our visual worlds”, Julie says. Bonding over their love of screen printing, tactile collage and experiments with colour has seen the pair initiate the first edition of the Ramette Festival, an illustration festival in Sète last October, as well as organising collective exhibitions, art markets and publishing projects together. One of the more steady results of this ongoing collaboration has been the creation of a number of zines.

These pursuits in micro-publishing have become an annual tradition that’s full of joy and discovery for the duo: “We make each new zine during a week-long reunion in Julie’s city, Sète, where she also has her screen printing workshop,” says Nina. “It’s a combination of creating together, spending time by the sea, drinking coffee in the sun and talking about life and drawing.” The pair’s goal is always to make space to try new things and work out a theme that’s linked to nature that they can both immerse themselves in fully when they plan for their next set of pages.

Julie and Nina’s latest sprint resulted in Alga, a pocketable publication all about seaweed – the perfect subject matter for two illustrators with effortlessly wiggly, organic styles. As their fourth zine project together, the work furthers their exploration of what happens when both of their visual voices meet in one medium. The idea to trial this through the documentation of this particular plant species came from their summer swims: both live by the sea Julie in Sète, France, and Nina in Barcelona, Spain. So, they set about documenting the variety of shapes and textures in these aquatic plants that they uncovered. “It was a very beautiful motif for us to work with as illustrators”, Julie says.

As both Julie and Nina often work with screen printing, it was the obvious choice for the technique to reproduce their collaborative collection of drawings and collages into a publication. The illustrators decided to screenprint the zines cover and print its inner pages on a softly coloured stock with Risograph, with the help of Postfire Books who printed the pair’s previous fanzine No hay rosas sin espinas. 100 copies later, the duo put on an exhibition of the prints to celebrate the zines launch in Nina’s hometown of Warsaw at Kwiaciarnia Grafiki gallery, where they held a live screen printing workshop for participants to print their seaweed shaped impressions on clothes and bags.

Like each iteration of this nature-focused publishing project, Alga stands as a documentation of the dialogue that took place between the artists on the very specific subject of seaweed – a way of showing their individual ways of interpreting one aspect of nature. These zines are now an integral part of their illustration practice and Julie and Nina “always look forward to this time working together”, Julie ends. “We’re only getting to know each other better and better, which makes our process and communication all the more fluid and smooth.”