Making a Zine

For this month's meeting of the MCBA Visual Journal Collective, we had a zine exchange. For the exchange each artist had to create and make copies of their zine to share with the group. Now if you are confused, a zine is a tiny book or magazine that is created using a single sheet of regular copy paper with content that you as the zine artist create (for an instruction sheet on layout see Roz Stendahl's blog here).

I have never made a zine before and I found it to be lots of fun. To create my zine, I decided on a theme and then went back through three years of sketchbooks to find sketches that fit the theme. I scanned in all of the drawings I wanted to include and then sized them down to the correct size and layout in a Photoshop document. I printed these sheets on my home printer and then brought the sheets to a local copy center to have them copied as double sided sheets to use in my zine. The sheets were then cut in half, folded and stitched together with a simple pamphlet stitch.
The image at the top of the page is a view of my studio table mid-process.
My theme was "repose" and I used images of my pets and family members at rest or asleep. It was interesting to create a book out of separate images that were created at different times and I am extremely happy with the results.
I made a bit of a happy mistake when I had my copies run and I have 15 extra copies of my zine. I would be willing to trade zines with any of you who want to make your our zine. It is easy and fun and we would get to trade artwork! Just email me (sznnhghs@gmail.com) when you have your zine ready and we can trade mailing info.
More on the exchange and zine collection in coming days.