As a follow up to my January post about zines, I finally made a zine by myself, copied and distributed to people in real life as I intended. I attended a free workshop at the local library a few months ago, and I made a quick collage zine about my favorite Vietnamese foods, with photos found online which I printed at home. But I didn’t have the brain cell to create my own zine with my own art or images. Despite buying many diy and more professional zines at art markets since then, I just didn’t have a subject to zine about.
Then I was browsing my Larme magazines to research for my 5 year update post on the fashion and in the Larme culture section of an older issue, they had a special article on zines in Japan! Since I technically was in my friend’s zine about J-fashion before, I thought J-fashion was a topic worth making a zine about.
A post about a local decoden/gyaru/y2k market came on my Instagram algorithm less than a month ago which I was curious about, and a week before it started I decided to make a freebie DIY zine to hand out at the event just for fun. I unfortunately worked 8 hours of overtime on the day before, when I could have finished my gyaru outfit and zine without rushing, but I finished the 2 arts for the zine at 3 am, then fixed layout and printed and folded zines the morning of the event. I made about 13 zines and passed out 8, so the rest will go to my friends in another city. Will post about my outfit and the event later.
I love these little one page zines, so cheap and easy to make (well once you have the content ready lol), but you do have to consider font size, also copying affects grey scale photo quality so black/white lines are best. Fun experiment, was greatly appreciated by the gyarus there, too. I dunno if I will make this available online though, it is personal, but we’ll see! Yay, one project done!