doodle-zine

[doodle-zine]

A bit of a housekeeping note about the timeline for this project: I am one person, and this is a fun summer project for me! I am trying to avoid turning it into a chore, which means it is going to happen at whatever pace I set for myself, and not any kind of hard timeline. (Which means probably on the slow side, as evidenced by the 3 week gap between the previous few posts.) To anyone who's been waiting for submissions to open up, thank you for being patient! Hopefully you won't have to wait much longer :)

#zine planning #this blog has about 12 followers so far and i think most of you know me so i doubt anyone is getting *too* impatient #but i'm saying this for my own sake :) and just to set expectations

[doodle-zine]

Doodle examples!

I know "doodle" gets used to refer to a lot of different kinds of art, so I want to make it super clear what this zine is supposed to be about.

I don't mean: Sketches, low-polish artwork, small-scale artwork, or anything that is a "less finished" version of a fully rendered piece of art. Those are all great, but they're not what this zine is for!

I do mean: Idle scribbles. Mechanical, absentminded marks. Sketchy small drawings that were never meant to be anything "good" or "finished." The kind of doodles you drew in the corners of your homework in middle school.

I know a lot of zines organized through the internet are "art zines." This is not an art zine! Imagine we're all passing a piece of paper and a pen around a table, and you have a minute or two to fill your section. You could fill the whole page with abstract scribbles, and that would be fine (encouraged even)!

The goal for this zine is not to demonstrate your artistic ability, however beginner or advanced you might be. The goal is to make some loose, messy, imperfect marks, and share them with each other for fun.

Here are a couple example submissions I made, to give an idea of what I envision the doodles in this zine looking like. These are the kinds of doodles I usually do--yours don't have to look like mine! But for anyone harboring concerns about artistic quality, know that the examples below are more than acceptable.

(I've signed my submissions as @ilovedthestars (without the i, as i spell it on other platforms) because I encourage anyone who submits to sign their entries! It won't be required, though.)

#zine planning

[doodle-zine]

By the way, I have been working on writing up Information for the big post i will make when i open submissions, but if anyone has clarifying questions in the meantime, please ask them! This zine already lives in my head as a whole Complete Thing but I know I have not actually explained it in much detail on tumblr yet. I'm happy to talk about what this will actually look like if you give me something specific that you'd like more info on.

#zine planning #i have already overthought this to the moon and back but i know that lives mostly in my head!

[doodle-zine]

So, I've been a bit distracted by other things and lost some momentum on this project, but I do have a google form all set up for zine submissions. Unfortunately I've hit a snag. I think I know how I want to deal with this, but it's just turned into one big stressful knot in my plans, so I'm here to check in and see how people feel about the possible solution.

Problem is, I realized at the last second that google is going to require a log-in for any form with a file submission (for security reasons, which is reasonable if inconvenient). I need a file submission question because I need images of doodles to be submitted to me so I can compile the zine. I have configured the form so I would not be able to see the email address of anyone who submits, but it would still require a gmail login to submit to the form.

I don't have an obvious alternative for filesharing that's convenient, anonymous, and doesn't require a login (because to be honest there's reasons those don't exist). What I'm thinking of doing, if it wouldn't put too many people off, is using the google form and offering anyone who doesn't have a gmail login to use the alternative option to DM me and submit through DMs or email or whatever we can work out.

Just wanted to get a temperature check on how well this solution would work for people:

Just to clarify, for all of these you would be able to have your submission appear in the zine with no name attached. Only the google form would be anonymous to me. Obviously DMing me would involve me knowing your username but you'd still have the option to be anonymous in the zine. I know DMing strangers is intimidating but I'm super chill I promise.

#if you would not be able to do any of these feel free to let me know in notes/dms/askbox if there is another method that would work for you! #i would like for this to be as low a barrier to entry as possible and i know for some people that means not having to Talk To A Person #however it looks like it's that or *some* kind of account login #and gmail is probably the one that the most people have tbh #zine planning #being Brave by posting this :') #started working on my fun little project and then ran face first into Slight Complications and got very disheartened #but instead of continuing to run away from this i am going to simply check and see if it is As Big Of A Deal as it seems

[doodle-zine]

(This is the first sideblog I've ever created, and i'm still getting used to having more than one blog to post to, so please pardon the occasional reblog that was meant for @ilovedthestars 😅)

#thanks to the friends who have pointed out the 2 times i have already done this

[doodle-zine]

Ok, the poll isn't completely closed yet but looks like there's at least 30 people among my followers and followers-in-law who'd be interested in putting their doodles in the Doodle Zine! I think I can safely assume that that's a lower bound, and if/when I make an actual submissions post it will spread farther and probably get more interest.

Which is a pretty substantial number of submissions to expect! So, time for a logistics question.

I want this to be a zine that people can print out and hold in their hands. There are a couple different formats I have in mind for this, and they both have benefits and drawbacks.

X-book - This is the traditional mini-zine format. It's one sheet of letter paper, folded into eighths and with a slit cut into the middle. Not counting the front and back cover, there are 6 pages, each 1/8 of a sheet of paper

Benefits: These are really simple to make--one sheet of paper, printed on only one side, and some scissors. No staples required. They're also a very nice pocket-size.

Drawbacks: There's only room in one of these for 6 people's doodles. If I get too many submissions for one zine, I'll happily just make this a series of zines--but with this format it would likely become a lot of zines pretty quickly.

Pamphlet - This is a pamphlet, meaning it's a stack of sheets folded in half (it would be stapled or sewn at the spine to secure them together, although this example isn't). In this case, the sheets are each half a sheet of letter paper, so each page of the zine is 1/4 of a sheet.

Benefits: This can have as many pages as you can reasonably fold together, which leaves a lot more room for a larger collection of doodles. (This one is made from eight half-sheets of paper, which gives us 30 pages plus cover.) The pages are also larger, so there's a bigger canvas to doodle on.

Drawbacks: These ones are a bit more work to put together. They need to be printed on both sides, cut in half, stacked in the right order, folded, and stapled (or sewn, if you're fancy). They're also just slightly too big to fit in a regular-sized stapler, which can be annoying (you can make it work but it's not perfect).

Secret other options - I personally really like the half-sheet size of pamphlet, but you can do this with any size of paper. We could do quarter-sheet pamphlets (mini-zine sized) or full sheet pamphlets (concert program sized). Smaller ones would be easier to staple, large ones would be harder. Otherwise the main difference is just how much space there is to draw & how much paper it uses.

So, the question is: Lots of little zines or fewer big zines? And is it worth the extra effort to put a pamphlet together so that more doodles can be included in one volume, or not?

#reblogging to this blog for archival purposes! #zine planning

[doodle-zine]

So i was bitten by the zine bug this semester and i keep thinking that a collaborative zine would be really fun to organize, especially one i could open up to my little corner of the internet. Not the shiny polished fandom zines that are really cool but also more of an anthology than a zine. I'm talking DIY photocopier and scissors zines--or as close as you can get over the internet, as the case may be.

The most fun and low stakes idea i have at the moment is a doodle zine. Like, what kinds of scribbles or shapes or little creatures do you draw in the margins of your notebooks? Fill a zine-sized page with them and send me a photo! Zero expectation of artistic skill or effort, just fill a page with marks and have fun.

And then i could stitch them together into both a digital zine file and a printable version you could use to make a paper copy. I think that would be a cool way to get as close to the physical collage vibes of a traditional zine as you can in a project that would obviously have to be conducted over the internet, where we can't just hand each other pieces of paper.

Anyway, i finally have both the motivation and the energy to potentially dive in to making this happen, but only if other people are actually interested. And this would look very different if 8 people want to participate vs. if 40 do. So:

Please feel free to reblog/spread this if you know others who might be interested! Right now this is just an idea i'm playing around with, but it might become a Real Thing very quickly if other people are also excited about it.

#reblogging to this blog for archival purposes! #zine planning

[doodle-zine]

This is a sideblog of @ilovedthestars for the purpose of organizing a collaborative zine of doodles from anyone who wants to participate! More coming soon!