A few days ago I shared a bit about my DIY writing retreat and my goal to publish my longest zine yet. I recieved a comment from someone who had never heard of zines before. So, I wanted to go in depth about zines, what they are and why I think they are superior forms of DIY publishing.
What is a zine?
The term zine comes from the word magazine. In short a zine is a DIY magazine. Unlike magazines, though, zines don't need to be polished or professional. While magazines are full of ads, zines are often made just foe fun and rarely for profit.
The purpose of zines is self expression. Over the yeard I have made zines full of my own poetry and art. When I was traveling, didn't have a cell phone & wasn't involved in social media at all, I mailed my latest zines to my group of pen pals & close friends.
Now that I am blogging on a weekly basis, however, I use zines as a way of keeping art in the physical realm rather than purely digital. So, these days I am actually turning my digital photography & blog posts into zines. Let me show you how ...
First I start with an idea. It can be anything. When I was in my teens & 20's my zines were always about my feelings and took the form of poetry and collage. These days I write zines to share my knowledge about herbalism and nature.
Here I have a ongoing project about butterflies. I wanted to make a zine about all the common butterflies I see regularly in my garden here in Argentina. So, I began by printing out the pictures I have taken over the years and left space on each page for fun facts found in books as well as online.
That particular zine is still a work in progress. It is the first zine I have ever written entirely in Spanish - which is not my first language. Other zines, however, were much faster to make. One such example are my zines about herbalism & plant lore.
Just like the butterfly zine, my herbalism zine started with an idea: to collect my favorite herbal recipes for skincare in one place. So I began by making one spread for each recipe and filling each page with photos from previous blog posts and writing out the instructions for each recipe.
As you can see it is all very hand made & crafty. That is my style, personally, and part of what gives zines their charm!
Once the layout is done I then move on to making copies. Sometimes I simply make photocopies of the original and other times I create a pdf so that I can print from my phone or computer wherever I am.
Most often I use recycled paper for the interior pages and craft paper for the cover. And when I have the pages all printed out comes the most fun: cutting and binding!
It is hard to go into the specifics of layouts & binding in a blog post. Really, my goal here was to share my process of inspiration and to show the benefits of publishing this way. While a traditionaly published book rarely contains color images and must be a certain length, zines can be any length, any size and about any topic you can imagine!!
If you want more dynamic instructions as well as examples of zines made by other creators, this video I made last year is a good place to go.
Happy crafting everyone!!