#make mistakes

and before we go super far into this, lemme show you what one of my zines looks like, so you know it’s not hard and you don’t have to teach yourself a bunch of new skills beyond the cut and paste skills you learned in grade school.

zines, for those who don’t know, are essentially self-made magazines. but they could be any design, any shape, any format. you can use any medium, whether it be collage, random doodles, junk journaling, vents, fan photographs, poetry, digital work, instructional, and so on. you can fold it or piece it together any way you see fit. and yeah, there are instructions and guides online and i’ll be sharing a few of them below as well for those who are curious, but for the most part it’s not something that has a specific set of rules.

the thing about zines that i think people don’t grasp, is that it’s not polished art. it’s based in subcultures like punk, where the point is not to be super good, but just to get it all out. it has a low cost of entry for a reason. it’s something that can be done with scraps, without needing to be pretty and publishable, because the act of making a zine is akin to publishing one. i’ve made zines with leftover glossy inserts from packaging that should have been thrown out. i drew on it with a leaky ink pen, getting smudges everywhere. i got the folds all wrong. and i still keep it in my room, and i look at it from time to time. because it’s mine, i made it, i repurposed trash and i did something with an hour’s worth of time in a hospital waiting room. that’s not nothing. when i give people prompts and run zine meetups, i make it clear that being good is not the point, and i intentionally challenge people to make at least one zine where the goal is to be intentionally terrible. it gets out the nerves, it helps retrain your brain to view something like that as acceptable. the point is not to be perfect, you will never be perfect, but you will have fun if you let go of your conditioning for a moment.

people look at zines and they think “wow, someone has made art, i can’t do that” and the fact of the matter is YES YOU CAN! go look up zines, go watch videos of people making them, it’s easier than you think. all you need is scrap paper, a scavenged pencil from the classroom floor, and a brain. that’s it, that’s all you need. you’re not making it for the world, you’re making it for you. and if afterwards you find that you hate it, good! you’ve done something, you learned something about yourself, you spent no money in the process (hopefully), and you got the creative juices flowing. if you fail, you are learning! failure is in the spirit of the subculture, you’re still doing well, and i’m proud of you. i’m not just saying that either, i’m fucking proud of you, and i want you to know that.

the zines i make aren’t high effort. i’m not spending ages trying to make things perfect. i take months to make a zine because of my hand mobility, so i don’t overwhelm my body and use up all my spoons. if i show you a zine, it’s something that the average person could’ve churned out in the better part of a day. i just take weeks or months because i’m giving myself the space to do things the way i find works best for me. it’s versatile for a reason, and it’s not a hard thing to learn. genuinely, if you wanna make a zine, just fold a paper into 8ths, slice the very middle of the page, fold it, and you’ve got an 8 page booklet ready to draw unimaginably terrible lines in.

genuinely, i think everyone would be better off if they learned how to make a zine. it’s perfect if you need an outlet that is gonna be healing, grounding, and creative all at once. more people need to try it. it’s freeing, and you’d be surprised how much more you enjoy life once you pick it up.

for anyone who’s curious, here’s a list of zine resources, a tiny (free) printable zine about zines, and a list of prompts.

Make New Mistakes ~