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So You Want to Make A (Paper) Zine
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beepbird)
This is a post on how to make a zine when you are working on paper, as compared to digital. It goes into how to lay out your pages for easy printing, how to scan and do post-production, and how to keep it easy on yourself, especially for a first go. You will need:
beepbird)This is a post on how to make a zine when you are working on paper, as compared to digital. It goes into how to lay out your pages for easy printing, how to scan and do post-production, and how to keep it easy on yourself, especially for a first go. You will need:
- paper
- stuff to make black marks on said paper (pens, markers, coal, cut-out newspaper text or magazine pics...)
- a scanner (arguably you could use a public library or something, but it's a paaaaain)
- a computer with an image-editing program (for this post, we use GIMP, which is free and open-source)
- (optional) scissors
- (optional) printer + ink/toner
- (optional) long-arm stapler + staples
- (optional) bone folder
Before we get started, a quick vocabulary lesson for clarity:
- A sheet is an individual piece of paper, which can be folded and/or cut into various numbers of pages. (The zines mentioned in this post can have anywhere from 4-18 pages per sheet.)
- A spread is what you see when you open a book (📖), usually two pages, which may or may not be on the same sheet. Some artists use a spread to smear the art across two pages (here's an example), but you do not need to do this; it's more work.
- A page, for the purposes of this post, is neither a spread nor a sheet. It's the smallest building block of the three. It's what you make your zine out of, and you only compile them into spreads and sheets later.
- Read-order describes a PDF file where the pages go in the same order as an ebook: 1, 2, 3, 4.
- Print-order describes a PDF file where the pages go in the order they print out, which only go into reading sequence after folding and stapling: 4, 1, 2, 3.
Super Easy One-Sheeter
For a first project, a pocket one-sheeter (which I sometimes elsewhere refer to as a one-pager, but that is imprecise and inaccurate) is low-stakes and will teach you some of the basic skills. You can easily make an eight-pager, 14-pager, or 18-pager with nothing but a flat surface, one sheet of paper, and a pair of scissors. Pick whichever suits you! Here are directions and specs:
* 8-pager (easiest, only requires one blank side; roughly 3" x 4")
* 14-pager (hardest, requires two blank sides; about 3" square)
* 18-pager (medium, requires two blank sides; about 1.5" x 2", maybe too small)
I love these simple one-sheeters; you can make them anywhere. I've made them tabling at cons. When I didn't have scissors, I made do by folding, licking the fold, and carefully ripping down the wet seam. (This is not recommended.) The 8-pager doesn't even require duplex printing, so you can run them off the crappiest home printer on earth!
For a first project, a pocket one-sheeter (which I sometimes elsewhere refer to as a one-pager, but that is imprecise and inaccurate) is low-stakes and will teach you some of the basic skills. You can easily make an eight-pager, 14-pager, or 18-pager with nothing but a flat surface, one sheet of paper, and a pair of scissors. Pick whichever suits you! Here are directions and specs:
* 8-pager (easiest, only requires one blank side; roughly 3" x 4")
* 14-pager (hardest, requires two blank sides; about 3" square)
* 18-pager (medium, requires two blank sides; about 1.5" x 2", maybe too small)
I love these simple one-sheeters; you can make them anywhere. I've made them tabling at cons. When I didn't have scissors, I made do by folding, licking the fold, and carefully ripping down the wet seam. (This is not recommended.) The 8-pager doesn't even require duplex printing, so you can run them off the crappiest home printer on earth!
Saddle-Stitched Pamphlet/Booklet
A saddle-stitched booklet (or floppy) is created by folding your sheets in half and then stapling them (or using embroidery thread, dental floss, hole punches, etc.) Folding them in half and stapling down the crease, rather than stapling individual pieces of paper together at the edge, makes them less prone to tearing and also makes them open more nicely.
Floppies aren't as easy and cheap as one-sheeters, but they ARE way easier and cheaper than books with spines. (Seriously, do not make a book with a spine your first project.) Using everyday staples, a floppy can hold up to 15 sheets of paper or 60 pages. If you try to overstuff your floppy, the staples won't go through, leading to lost pages, jammed staplers, and annoyance.
If you're an American and you want to make things easy on yourself, you're going to want to work with pages that are either 8.5" x 11" (AKA full-size) or 5.5" x 8.5" (AKA half-size). Why? Because every scanner in America can handle those sizes, every print shop in America can print on sheets that are 8.5" x 11" or 11" x 17", and hand-trimming your pages is what zinesters have to do in Hell. Make it easy for yourself. Work at 100% size, whip out an ordinary piece of paper, either fold it in half or don't, and start noodling!
A little prep beforehand will make printing easier later. For instance, color printing is expensive and finicky, and grays can depend on the printer, so black lines on white paper are the easiest and cheapest to reproduce. Clear tape like Scotch tape will cause only minor trouble, but rubber cement or glue sticks will cause zero. Make a nice white margin around the edges of each page, at least .25", so no art gets cut off by the printer or eaten by the spine. Though it is tempting, don't work on both sides of the sheet, lest ink leak through and stain the page on the other side. Make sure that you make pages in a multiple of four. Remember, one sheet equals four pages, and any sheet you don't fill will leave an awkward white blank somewhere in your zine. Be creative! Add "about the author," copyright, or silly ad pages!
If you're going for the real rough-and-real, you can draw/write in ink from the get-go, but this is not recommended unless you're willing to accept typos or lots of post-production work. In old-school comics, you penciled first, inked over them, and then erased the pencils, but nowadays, there are ways to cut down on the erasing task: instead of using your usual gray pencil, use a red, green, or (non-photo) blue one instead! All of those colors can be found in eraseable form, either Crayola (if you're cheap) or Col-Erase (if you're fancy), and there are various brands of non-photo blue (so-called because in the old days, their color was invisible in reproduction). We'll discuss how to digitally remove the pencil lines later.
Don't worry about spreads right now; that comes later. Just focus on your pages. Draw, write, collage stuff from magazines and newspapers, go buck wild. We learn through happy accidents and mistakes! Experiment! Have fun! It's better to be casual and crazy than to get overly precious and perfectionistic. Throw out our guidelines if they don't help you make the damn thing; that's what matters most, and you will discover your own preferences and workflow only through doing it.
A saddle-stitched booklet (or floppy) is created by folding your sheets in half and then stapling them (or using embroidery thread, dental floss, hole punches, etc.) Folding them in half and stapling down the crease, rather than stapling individual pieces of paper together at the edge, makes them less prone to tearing and also makes them open more nicely.
Floppies aren't as easy and cheap as one-sheeters, but they ARE way easier and cheaper than books with spines. (Seriously, do not make a book with a spine your first project.) Using everyday staples, a floppy can hold up to 15 sheets of paper or 60 pages. If you try to overstuff your floppy, the staples won't go through, leading to lost pages, jammed staplers, and annoyance.
If you're an American and you want to make things easy on yourself, you're going to want to work with pages that are either 8.5" x 11" (AKA full-size) or 5.5" x 8.5" (AKA half-size). Why? Because every scanner in America can handle those sizes, every print shop in America can print on sheets that are 8.5" x 11" or 11" x 17", and hand-trimming your pages is what zinesters have to do in Hell. Make it easy for yourself. Work at 100% size, whip out an ordinary piece of paper, either fold it in half or don't, and start noodling!
A little prep beforehand will make printing easier later. For instance, color printing is expensive and finicky, and grays can depend on the printer, so black lines on white paper are the easiest and cheapest to reproduce. Clear tape like Scotch tape will cause only minor trouble, but rubber cement or glue sticks will cause zero. Make a nice white margin around the edges of each page, at least .25", so no art gets cut off by the printer or eaten by the spine. Though it is tempting, don't work on both sides of the sheet, lest ink leak through and stain the page on the other side. Make sure that you make pages in a multiple of four. Remember, one sheet equals four pages, and any sheet you don't fill will leave an awkward white blank somewhere in your zine. Be creative! Add "about the author," copyright, or silly ad pages!
If you're going for the real rough-and-real, you can draw/write in ink from the get-go, but this is not recommended unless you're willing to accept typos or lots of post-production work. In old-school comics, you penciled first, inked over them, and then erased the pencils, but nowadays, there are ways to cut down on the erasing task: instead of using your usual gray pencil, use a red, green, or (non-photo) blue one instead! All of those colors can be found in eraseable form, either Crayola (if you're cheap) or Col-Erase (if you're fancy), and there are various brands of non-photo blue (so-called because in the old days, their color was invisible in reproduction). We'll discuss how to digitally remove the pencil lines later.
Don't worry about spreads right now; that comes later. Just focus on your pages. Draw, write, collage stuff from magazines and newspapers, go buck wild. We learn through happy accidents and mistakes! Experiment! Have fun! It's better to be casual and crazy than to get overly precious and perfectionistic. Throw out our guidelines if they don't help you make the damn thing; that's what matters most, and you will discover your own preferences and workflow only through doing it.
Scanning, Digitizing, and Post-Production
You have your pages all ready? Excellent! Look upon your work, ye mighty, and rejoice! Now we get into the donkey labor.
Put your pages into your scanner. If your page has wrinkled, crinkled, or curved, it will scan with shadows or blurriness, so try to make it as flat as possible. (In other words, if you are scanning sketchbook pages, gently squish it against the scanner glass.)
Some old scanners will auto-rotate and crop your images. Some other scanners will also auto-brighten or mess with the contrast settings to "improve" your art, which is fine if you're working in only black and white but might give you gray hair if you work in gray or colors or subtleties. Try to dig into the settings and turn all that shit off, since you're going to be doing all this work yourself anyway. Make sure they scan at 300 DPI or higher, for print resolution. (We always use 300 DPI ourself.)
Scan your pages, and then pop each one into GIMP. You might notice that your blacks look dark gray, while your whites look light gray. It might look okay on your screen, but it will NOT look good printed; you want your blacks BLAAAACK and your whites WHIIIIIITE. (You might need to crank up your monitor's brightness to be sure, if you're like me and use dimmer tools.) Depending on what pencils you might have, you may also have those to worry about.
First, we'll deal with any of those pesky colored pencil lines. You can easily remove damn near all your red, green, or blue by using the Decompose (A+C+O+D) function in GIMP. Choose "RGB" and a new image will be created with three grayscale layers. The layer labeled with the color you penciled in will damn near be spotless. No erasing required!
However, you might notice still some very light gray from where your colored pencils were, and you still need to deal with your blacks and whites. In GIMP, messing with the "levels" function (Alt+C+L) will make your blacks blacker and your whites whiter; just nudge the little black slider further to the right and the little white slider further to the left until things look right.
Kelly Turnbull (AKA coelasquid) also has a whole tutorial on stripping out colored lines under black and white inks in Photoshop here.
While you're at this, make sure that all your pages have the exact correct image size for printing! If you're working at 300 DPI, that's also 300 pixels per inch, which means a half-size page will be 1650 x 2550 pixels, while a full-size page is 2550 x 3300 pixels. (Don't worry about spreads.) If you are tiny bits of pixels off, go to Canvas Size (Alt+I+V) and choose the correct pixel numbers. Make sure nothing gets cut off! You might need to select the page, cut and paste and scoot it around a little to make sure it's perfectly centered.
Name your pages in strict numerical order, and save your images as PNGs. Don't use JPEGs, you will weep.
You have your pages all ready? Excellent! Look upon your work, ye mighty, and rejoice! Now we get into the donkey labor.
Put your pages into your scanner. If your page has wrinkled, crinkled, or curved, it will scan with shadows or blurriness, so try to make it as flat as possible. (In other words, if you are scanning sketchbook pages, gently squish it against the scanner glass.)
Some old scanners will auto-rotate and crop your images. Some other scanners will also auto-brighten or mess with the contrast settings to "improve" your art, which is fine if you're working in only black and white but might give you gray hair if you work in gray or colors or subtleties. Try to dig into the settings and turn all that shit off, since you're going to be doing all this work yourself anyway. Make sure they scan at 300 DPI or higher, for print resolution. (We always use 300 DPI ourself.)
Scan your pages, and then pop each one into GIMP. You might notice that your blacks look dark gray, while your whites look light gray. It might look okay on your screen, but it will NOT look good printed; you want your blacks BLAAAACK and your whites WHIIIIIITE. (You might need to crank up your monitor's brightness to be sure, if you're like me and use dimmer tools.) Depending on what pencils you might have, you may also have those to worry about.
First, we'll deal with any of those pesky colored pencil lines. You can easily remove damn near all your red, green, or blue by using the Decompose (A+C+O+D) function in GIMP. Choose "RGB" and a new image will be created with three grayscale layers. The layer labeled with the color you penciled in will damn near be spotless. No erasing required!
However, you might notice still some very light gray from where your colored pencils were, and you still need to deal with your blacks and whites. In GIMP, messing with the "levels" function (Alt+C+L) will make your blacks blacker and your whites whiter; just nudge the little black slider further to the right and the little white slider further to the left until things look right.
Kelly Turnbull (AKA coelasquid) also has a whole tutorial on stripping out colored lines under black and white inks in Photoshop here.
While you're at this, make sure that all your pages have the exact correct image size for printing! If you're working at 300 DPI, that's also 300 pixels per inch, which means a half-size page will be 1650 x 2550 pixels, while a full-size page is 2550 x 3300 pixels. (Don't worry about spreads.) If you are tiny bits of pixels off, go to Canvas Size (Alt+I+V) and choose the correct pixel numbers. Make sure nothing gets cut off! You might need to select the page, cut and paste and scoot it around a little to make sure it's perfectly centered.
Name your pages in strict numerical order, and save your images as PNGs. Don't use JPEGs, you will weep.
PDFing
Okay, so now you have a nice stack of identically-sized PNGs, numbered in order. You want to put them into a PDF now, because that's what all print shops swear by and your printer will approve to. Luckily for you, we already made a post on how to PDFize your pages! Go, grasshopper, get hopping!
If you have a print shop you go to, your work is now about over. You send them the print PDF, tell them paper size, number of copies, saddle-stitched and any other relevant details, and wait for them to do the job. But if you're feeling adventurous, read on!
Okay, so now you have a nice stack of identically-sized PNGs, numbered in order. You want to put them into a PDF now, because that's what all print shops swear by and your printer will approve to. Luckily for you, we already made a post on how to PDFize your pages! Go, grasshopper, get hopping!
If you have a print shop you go to, your work is now about over. You send them the print PDF, tell them paper size, number of copies, saddle-stitched and any other relevant details, and wait for them to do the job. But if you're feeling adventurous, read on!
Printing and Binding At Home
Okay, so you have your print PDF. Now the fun part: you finally get to see the (or at least A) final product!
This part presumes you have a duplex (two-sided) printer. There are ways to work around a printer that only prints one-sided, but I cannot help you, because I just pay my local print shop to do that for me. Sorry!
If you want to print at home, you will need
If your zine is a one-sheeter:
Congratulations! You've made your very first zine!
Okay, so you have your print PDF. Now the fun part: you finally get to see the (or at least A) final product!
This part presumes you have a duplex (two-sided) printer. There are ways to work around a printer that only prints one-sided, but I cannot help you, because I just pay my local print shop to do that for me. Sorry!
If you want to print at home, you will need
- a printer (make sure you have plenty of ink/toner!)
- paper
- long-arm stapler (so it can reach far enough to staple the spines)
- a bone folder (do not get a plastic one; I love my bone one and it cost me like $10 and will last until I die, it's a wonderful object and makes life better)
If your zine is a one-sheeter:
- Open the PDF in Foxit Reader
- Under Print Handling, click the big blue Scale Box
- Fit to Printer Margins (if it's not already at 100% size)
- Auto-Center (otherwise it'll print uncentered, no matter what the file says)
- PRINT!
- cut and fold (use the tutorials linked up at the top)
- Open the PDF in Foxit Reader
- Click "print on both sides of paper"
- Click "flip on short-edge" option. (Otherwise each spread will be half upside down and you will weep. The "edge" refers to what side the binding would be on, for a book. So, hamburger fold or half-size zine is short edge. Hot dog fold or full-size and stapled in one corner, like school essays, is long edge.)
- If printing multiple copies, MAKE SURE you click the 'collate' box, or you'll have to sort all the pages yourself and it will be a pain.
- PRINT!
- Open the PDF in Foxit Reader
- Click "Booklet" and it will remember to do it two-sided all by itself.
- Take a glance and make sure the pages are organizing properly
- PRINT!
Congratulations! You've made your very first zine!
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Thank you!
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