Various Zines

Popped into the studio this morning, to make sure I got all the zines done in time to send off on Monday. Here's the rest of the pages all cut and folded and ready to put together.

Got them all stapled! They're a lot easier to control now. Up until this point I always worry about dropping pages or getting all messed up.

But this bit is also scary 'cause if I stapled them wrong it'll be a total pain to fix.

Thankfully it all went well.

Next is to trim the zines down to size, another moment where I worry about screwing everything up, lol!

I keep the measurements there so I can quickly do both the ends, trimming off first one margin, then the other, finally turning in 90 degrees so I can trim the final edge.

Here they all are!

And there we go, all the rest of the zines done!! That was fun, and now to head back home.

Now I have to figure out if these go in zines or riso prints 😁 I think this one is more zine that happens to use riso printing, than riso printing in zine format.

As with a lot of things I do this is, of course, a test for when I want to do it properly. I've already learnt quite a bit about how bleed areas are actually yes important and I can't just squeeze exactly two A5 pages on an A4 sheet, or two A4 pages on an A3, etc.

Either I have to put one A5 page in the middle of A4, if I want it to really be A5, or, make all my stuff a bit smaller, which is the option I've gone for here.

'Cause this is practice (to find out if doing this is practical) and I needed to make it quickly, I took one of our blog posts; "The Forgetful Web: A Case for Reflective Archiving" and threw it into InDesign.

I wasn't sure how many pages it would flow over, so that was the first thing to check, get the font and the margins right, and then flow the text from one page to the next until all the text was there. It filled about 13 pages, which is just right for adding in some images, which is what I did next.

The short is I ended up with some nice layouts that I sent to the riso printer.

Next step, cutting all the pages up. These aren't trimmed yet, just cut up enough that I can collate and staple them.

The last bit of trimming, and rounding the corners and I have the finished zines. Well, five of them.

I wanted to make sure I had everything right before starting to cut up all 25 of them. Seems to work!

And here are some shots from inside.

Got around to stitching the photobook together with Japanese Stab Stitching. Hard to show how beautiful the thing is here, light delicate pages held together with thread.

Anyway, one of a kind and now only exists in photo form as later this day I headed over to drop it off, it lived for four days in my studio, summoned out of thin air and vanished off to a different studio.

I kinda love it.

Last week I went to my friend's studio, where there was an exhibition going on with four artists. I shot some video and I really like the images you get when exporting a single frame from the video, compared to a normal photo.

So, as a gift I quickly exported nine frame from the video, printed them in extra thin rice paper and cut them down in size.

A quick "The Sea Howls From The West" zine update, got all the pages printed and cut up, phew! I did get more photos but they all turned out to be out of focus 🤷‍♂️

Started the zine yesterday, got it being cut up and stapled together today! Looks like I managed to prove to myself that I can get a zine done quickly (which is one of the points of zines I suspect).

Anyway, that was quick and fun, and now I can send postcards and zines explaining the postcards to people!

Lol, so of course I got perfectionism block on the zine I was supposed to be making, to break from my perfectionism block on the studio zine.

As I've been working on using rubber stamps with the drawing machine, and I'd turned some of the big prints into postcards, I thought it'd be fun to make a very quick, not caring, zine, just to prove to myself I could do it.

Today I did all the layouts and wrote all the words and trimmed the pages down for a zine about the "Fucking Postcards".

For some reason I've gotten a mental block, or perhaps a perfectionism block with the studio zine. So while I'm working on The Sea Howls From The West I thought I'd make a zine about that instead, and I'd learn a bunch of stuff I can apply to the studio zine.

Makes sense in a weird way.

As I'd been playing with seeing how the ink separates into component colours I thought it'd be fun to drop some ink onto the cover and it'd spread in interesting ways. Turns out it just makes the cover look gross instead 🤷‍♂️

I've sort of figured out the layout and content, but now I need to take lots of photos of the inks (boring!)

I've been thinking about making zines.

Someone suggested I make a video about my studio, a "Studio Tour 2025" type thing, which is fine, but it got me thinking about where I work in a different way.

Instead of showing all the things in the studio, what if I explain what all the different areas and spaces were for. How I function in the art studio, my daily flow around the workshop, where I start, where I spend my time and how everything is arranged to help me do that.

And I figured it may be interesting to make a zine out of it instead of a video. A zine I could then send to people, to sort of explain what I do.

These photos are from my planning how the zine could work, and what the layout may look like.