Zines

Zine: Exploring is learning

/ Process, Zines / ,

I wanted to do a space and sea theme for a while, but I was stuck on the words. And then NASA found water on the moon.

I love how the colors, text, and illustrations came together. If you want to read about my process for this zine, keep scrolling after the images. 🙂

Color photocopies of this zine are available in my Etsy shop.

I started with a white sheet of cardstock and used blue and black stamping inks to build the background colors.

The blue ink is distress oxide ink, so it reacts with water. After the blue and black inks dried on the page, I sprayed the blue area with water and used a clean brush to move the water around and add some texture. Then I let it dry completely. I drew the seaweed and everything else in the blue area with Tombow dual brush pens.

I drew the stars and moon in the black area with a white gel pen.

To create the text, I used a Phomemo thermal printer with sticker paper.

My zine process

/ Process, Zines /

A zine about how I make zines. So meta!

Full disclosure: I wanted to draw little Daleks and built the rest of this zine around them.

Bonus material

Planning

If I don’t quite know what I want to write or draw, I plan out the zine on one page, like so:

This acts as a rough draft of my zine, so I can sort out what I want on each page.

Guiding

I like to work on zines with the page unfolded, so I use small sticky notes to label each page, like this:

This lets me work on pages in whatever order I want, without losing track of the order in the folded zine. And, having the page unfolded means I don’t have to worry about ink bleeding through to another page.

Zine: How to spot a time traveler

/ Process, Zines / , ,

A handy little zine for how to identify potential time travelers.

Copies of this zine are available in my Etsy shop. This zine is also part of the sci-fi bundle.

To make the background for this zine, I started with white cardstock paper. I used distress oxide inks (3 shades of blue) and blended them on the paper with a sponge applicator. This ink reacts with water, so I used a gear stencil and traced the gear shapes with a brush and plain water. That’s what made the sort of ghost-looking gears. I used watercolor brush pens with the stencil to create the darker blue and purple gears. The blue and orange clock faces (most of the cover page and the clock faces on the inside pages) are scrapbook paper that I happened to have and fit perfectly. 🙂

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