Police Sketch Zine

 First Society Zine 

We came up with the idea of making a zine out of the Police Sketch activity we did on 03/10/25, as we thought it'd be nice to give everyone something physical made of the silly art they created. 

I had planned to create a simple 'page by page' zine, but we ended up doing three police sketches, so there turned out to be too many, and the zine would cost a lot. So we thought of making a 'foldy' zine instead, that way we could print the zine on one A3 page and fold it up into a little book that would open up. We made a mock-up:

I had also made some sketches of the front cover while we were in the police sketch social, as I wanted to opinion of the others. 

They all seemed to like the rightmost sketch, and Helena suggested we could do a collage-type style and actually scan in string, pins and cut-out letters. We decided that was a great idea and completely ran away with it. :)

Helena and I decided we would meet on a day and compile the zine together, so we met on Wednesday and brought in the objects and paper we would need to scan. Helena brought in the random object (pins, string and cut-out letters) and I had drawn the silhouetted portraits that would go on the front. 

Together, we picked out the letters and arranged them to spell out the names we had thought up in the social, and then we cello-taped them to paper. 

First, we tried to create the zine on InDesign, but that proved to be too difficult as there was a lot of photo editing we would need to do. So we decided to use Photoshop instead, since I am more proficient at that, and we could manipulate the images more easily. We created a grid with Photoshop to mark out the pages and used our mock-up to get everything in the right place. 

It took a while to collect everything and place all the components the way we wanted, but it was a lot faster in Photoshop, and if anything, it was a nice refresher for me. 

We worked with everything in colour, knowing that we wanted the final zine to be black and white due to it being cheaper to print, and it would make the zine look more 'punky'. 

First we printed the zine out on plain white paper but we thought that it was too shiny and we wanted more texture. So, after consulting a uni tutor for some feedback, she suggested we use thin newsprint paper as it has a slight cream colour and a newspaper texture. The paper was perfect. So, we printed out sixteen so that we would have enough to give to the society members, as well as a few spares for ourselves and the Zineopolis. 

After printing them, they dried quite wrinkly because of the thin paper. So, we put them in the book-press overnight so that they would be flat and professional-looking.