Sunday 15 July 2012

The easy guide to zine making...

I wrote this a couple of years ago to feature on a website for pre- teen girls...

So you love magazines, you want to make your own. You don’t know how, you suck at doing anything technical on a computer. It’s ok you can still make your own fabulous zine, we’ll show you how!

All you need is some ideas, a pen, some paper, scissors and a glue stick!

How to make a ‘cut ‘n’ paste style’ A5 zine…..

-Cut ‘n’ paste style means just that, it involves cutting and pasting! They usually look a bit messy, lot’s of words and collage style pictures.

-Start by getting together what you want in your zine; rants, reviews, drawings, stories, anything really. If it makes it easier, give yourself a theme, like a music zine or a fashion zine.

-Once you’ve got all the stuff you want in your zine you can start laying it out. You need to work in A5 format (that’s A4 folded in half!). So if you’re writing/typing stuff out make sure it’s not too wide to fit on an A5 piece of paper (15cm).

-Collect pictures, doodles and stuff for background. Words are nice but they’re better with a few pics here and there! Use old magazines and wrapping paper because then you’ll be recycling too!

-when gluing down your words and pictures, glue them on individual pieces of A5. This will make it easier when compiling your zine.

-Now time for some maths (UGH, we hear you cry, thought zine making was fun!). It’s OK, it’s not much. Just remember that you need to make sure that however many pages of A5 you have to go in your zine, make sure it’s a multiple of FOUR (that means you see it on the 4 times table somewhere!) Otherwise you’ll be left with blank pages.

-Here’s the tricky part (more maths we’re afraid!). Count how many pages you have. Divide that number by four, this tells you how many pieces of A4 paper you will need, IE: for 20 A5 sheets get 5 pieces of A4. Fold them in half together like a book. Jot down on each side of paper which zine articles will go where, start with the cover obviously! This way when you photocopy it, any article that goes over one A5 page will follow on nicely.

-When you’ve figured that out, glue them all down! When you separate the A4 pages you should have zinegae stuck on both sides. If it DOESN’T follow on (on each sheet) then you’ve done it correctly!

-Now all you have to do is get it double side photocopied. Give it to the ‘rentals to get it done in the office for free, or your teacher at school/college! Failing that you’ll have to take it somewhere and pay, sheeesh! Oxfam is really cheap and you’d be donating to charity at the same time. Make sure you ask an assistant to get it copied double sided!

There you go you’ve made your very own zine. Now feel extremely proud of yourselves, cuz we do EVERY TIME we make one!!

2 comments:

Claire said...

this summer I'm going to do it: this summer is going to be the summer of the ZINE!!!!!!!!

Sugar Paperette said...

That's it you said it now, I wanna see this ZINE!!!