Zine Thing!
I can't draw—I have no training and less talent—but I made a mini-zine of some of my drawings, anyway!
After reading Kathleen Jennings's posts about her observation notebooks (linked in my post about copyright), I got Lynda Barry's excellent book Syllabus and decided to do some drawing.
Zines can be physical or digital, photocopied, printed, or entirely handmade. The subject can be whatever you want it to be: art, poetry, essays, collage, recipes, DIY, activism, or whatever else you want to share.
Most of the drawings I put in my zine are daily emotional/state of mind self-portaits, but one (“Ancient Pig”) was from a game of Mad Libs, and one (“Sad Potato”) was a surprise doodle that took shape on its own.
If you want a physical copy of my zine, you can download a pdf and fold it up into a minizine (the link is to instructions on folding an eight-page mini-zine from My Modern Met).
Worried about Accidental Rudeness Zine © 2025 by Ann Cooper
Zine Links: Explore and Make Your Own!
This zine libguide from the Library of Virginia has great stuff in the tabs:
A timeline of the origins and development of zines.
A list of books on making zines in the “Zine Resources” tab.
Links to digital collections of zines.
A section on making your own zine with instructions for physical zine making and folding, templates for physical zines, links to tools for making electronic zines, and good roundup on creative commons, public domain, and copyright!
Cornell has another great libguide on zines, also with a timeline, even more resources for making your own, and links to discover zine collections.
This fun random zine format and idea generator is linked to from the libguide’s “Make a Zine” tab.
The Library of Congress “Zine Web Archive” collects electronic zines.
Zine Machine “is an online lit mag and a literal zine vending machine” that’s doing some really neat stuff.
Check out the beautiful zines and art printing on a risograph machine in this blog from the Riso Pop risograph studio.
Carolyn Yoo wrote up her journey to learning to print her own zines with a risograph in her post “How To Print a Risograph Zine”.