Details how secondary students can make simple fanzines from a single sheet of paper. First published in SchoolArts Magazine.

1. Zines: Making Fanzines to Share.
High School Studio Lesson
Carol Horst
One of the best things about teaching art is that through informal interaction during project time
the classroom can become a community and smaller groups that work closely together daily can
become a kind of family. Some classes bond more closely than others. Given a class that
became especially close and too few days at the end of the year to begin a big project, I had the
perfect opportunity to give this tight-knit group the experience of creating their first “zine,” and
also start their first art collection. After I explained the history of zines (short for magazine or
“fanzine”), we discussed their appeal. They are easily reproducible, inexpensive, extremely
adaptable to almost any idea, and can be shared and collected easily. Examples of zines are
plentiful online.
Students began by folding standard printer paper into a booklet that requires no binding:

2. Then students marked the pages so they could remember which were the front and back
covers, and which way was up on each page. This paper was for practicing; final designs were
re-drawn or traced onto a fresh sheet. Students also had to remember to leave a ¼” border
around the edge, because standard copy machines crop slightly. Drawings in black pen resulted
in the clearest reproductions. This project is wonderfully open-ended: students can include
words, tell a story, express personal interests, work with abstraction, include comics,
appropriate magazine pictures, or explore any kind of theme they choose.
When the drawings were complete, I photocopied a class set of each book so that each artist
could share theirs with every other student in the class. Each student was given the photocopies
of their own zine and spent a period folding, cutting, and assembling their booklets before
sharing their artwork with the class.
Each young artist went home with a meaningful collection: a stack of zines, created by their
friends. These inexpensive little booklets, made in just a few days, turned out to be the perfect
way to celebrate friendship and share art.
Carol Horst is an art teacher at Tehachapi High School in Tehachapi, California.
801 South Dennison Road
Tehachapi, CA 93561
(661) 972-0393
carolhrst@gmail.com