Zine Club

My first year on Patreon (2022) I made a zine (almost) every month. They were all one page zines, the kind where you take a piece of paper, fold it into eight parts, and slice it in the middle so it makes a neat little book. Most were just black and white, drawn in ink, easy to reproduce (as opposed to color printing—I did still order them from a local print shop).

This project was consuming. It took so much of my time and creative energy, and it was costly to print and send. I had to call it after a year, but I thought that I would keep making zines, you know, when I wanted to. I haven’t made one since.

It remains one of my most favorite projects to date, and one of my most successful. They are (at the time of writing this,) available in my shop to purchase, and, even though I don’t think I could do one a month, I have been thinking about making more soon.

I drew most of them with a Pilot Kakuno fountain pen with Platinum Carbon Ink on Tomoe River Paper. I switched to this method after my first one got too hard on my hands. I had been using a Muji gel pen (0.38) on regular copy paper. Those pens are so black and fine—it looked amazing, but my hand would be cramped for days. One of these zines generally took me about 8-12 hours to draw, possibly longer. The fountain pen on smooth paper helped with the strain.

Yes, maybe it’s time to revisit this little project…