Collage Zines

BACK UP (2021) (NSFW)

BACK UP was my ever first full-colour collage zine. This zine is a collection of my physical and digital collage works from Summer 2020 through Fall 2021. It’s a meditation on the commodification of female sexuality through which I aimed to find my place in the world.

AGORA (2023)

My 2023 collage zine, AGORA, is another blend of my physical and digital collages. Some works in this zine go back a lot farther: I made the centrefold as a teenager. AGORA is a zine about being inside and going outside, a reflection on living with agoraphobia.

How I Made AGORA

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I used to only make collage zines by hand. It was challenging to find a program with UI that mimicked the real-life copy-paste process, with the ability to simply cut and move entire pages at will. Here is how I made AGORA.

First, I made a ton of collages on my laptop and on paper. I scanned the paper collages, and then I used the open-source software Scribus to lay out my artwork.

I tried different page layouts to see what I liked best. I asked my best friend, Siri, to look them over with me as I went, readjusting the composition as we went.

After I finished my two-page PDF versions of my zines, I was able to get them professionally printed, which was very exciting to me as a DIY girl!

In the first screenshot, I was so close to having my final page order (ultimately the two pieces were inverted), but the art was incomplete. In the second, I’d finished both works, but their order was wrong.

You can see from these screenshots how I can sometimes re-adapt my collage works to fit the zine. Sometimes it’s micro-edits like brightness and colour grading, and sometimes the edits are more dramatic, with entire pages reworked to better fit my ideas and themes.