DIY ZINE - LABUBU

A zine (pronounced ‘zeen’) is an independently or self-published booklet, either created by collaging or digitally.

Zines have been used throughout history, most famously known in the 1970’s punk scene, to promote music and political agendas. However, they have made a revival in recent years.

The best thing about zines is, there’s NO rules. You can do a zine about pretty much anything, in whatever style you want and shared however you like.

Here is a short step-to-step guide to make your own first cool zine, including the story of the rise of LABUBU the monster. Have fun!

Here is a list of the tools and materials I used for making this special fandom zine:

1. A4 paper sheet
2. A scissors
3. A mini pocket printer for the adhesive labels (with adhesive label of course)
4. The Adobe Creative Suite (Illustrator) or any other illustration software
5. Different pens (I used gloss paint makers and a ballpoint pen)
6. Different colours of highlighters
7. A bone folder

A7 (a zine out of 1 piece of A4 paper):

1. Fold your A4 paper in half (lengthwise)
2. Fold in half again
3. Fold in half again
4. Unfold it, to find 8 folded pages
5. Fold in half and cut the centre (halfway down the page)
6. Unfold your paper. You should see a slit in the middle of the page
7. Fold in half (lengthwise) and push together
8. Number your pages in the right order and rotation
9. TA DA! You’ve created your own zine

To create the labels that will be sticked into our zine, we are going to make a vector graphic of the LABUBU.

1. To do so, open an illustration software (like Adobe Illustrator or Affinity Designer) and draw the shape of the little monster toy.
2. Then start to color it by using the colour palette.
3. Add additional details to it to make it more individual.
4. You don't really need to use a background for the graphics as shown in the picture above, a simple PNG-file with transparent background will do.
5. When you finished with the graphic design, go ahead and turn on your mini pocket printer.
6. Print 8 labels with the LABUBU on it, according to the instructions of your personal printer. In the end we'll have 8 labels printed.

Now we can start to use pens, labels and any other decorative material to stick it into our zine. As this part is limited only to your imagination, I won't explain the details.

At the end you should have an interesting she short booklet about the rise of the LABUBU (or any other toy you like) consisting of graphics, text and scribbles.

To make your zine even more outstanding, you can now use the highlighters to colour the content.

That's pretty much it!

Congratulations, you made your first fandom zine! Now you can share it.