The Zine Fayre - Final Post

After many weeks of exploring what a Zine is, how they have been created over the years, distributed, and trips to various locations, The Zine Fayre was finally ready for today! 

 

Tables set up to present our zines at the "2022 NQ" venue in the Northen Quater, a perfectly chosen location for an upcoming student art fayre.

 We set up our tables. Some of the girls made bags for the zine to be given in, with additional business cards, extra zines they fancied making at last minuite, and extra prints.

 The day was straightforeward at the setting up stage. once getting the table sorted, we ran down to a local fabric shop for a table cloth, and then arranged our work next to the other groups, in an easily accessible way for the public to navigate.

In terms of pricing, we decided upon £5 per zine, since individually they were about £7 roughly to create, including minor costs and the printing.

It was also incredibly interesting to see what the other groups had decided to create.

 Johanna's "Misty's Mum" paranormal zine was a favourite of mine, tributing the old misty comics of the 70s. Her stall included sweets and free tarrot readings, giving a great outlook in my opinion. definatly one of the most interactive stalls present.

As time went on, the Fayre began to bustle, as fellow students, and the general public also came to visit, and purchase our goods. I don't think there was a single table that didn't get a few purchases. Any that were not purchased on the day could be sold in the future.  

A landscape of the majority of the fayre. A small space, but a busy one as time went on!

The zine catalogue that fellow ziners Bea and Tom created were a handy guide to the general stalls and contributors in the fayre, making sure nobody was missed off the list. I helped fold a few of them out as we set up.

Another shot of our table before we started. As the fayre went on towards the end, we atleast made £30, with the Playscape zine being the most popular of the two, and the seperate prints also being rather popular.

Chloe's Ampersand Zine was a very slick publication, complete with a ring tie and plastic case. I purchased this and the Journey one as mementos from the project.



We also shared the space with the book group, featuring double spread pages from their work. I heard talk that some of the displayed work attracted new possible clients! 

 The ampersand Zine in all it's glory. I bought a copy, alongside the Journey Zine as mementos from submitting to the extra zines. A mention in a zine being sold to the public means alot, especially when you see the end result.

Our first sale of the day was to fellow student Reno from our course, who was displaying his book work in the venue. The newfound buzz from selling artwork I have taken part in has given me a much greater inspiration to do this again in the future. Maybe I'll even stick with zine creation?

The Zine fayre went on for the day, and was a big success.

Unit X (Round 2) - The Verdict:

It's been a very interesting project, probably one of the most productive projects I've been involved with this year.

Before deciding to do the Zine project, I crafted a book, based around Little Red Riding Hood, which was more of an illustrative project, rather than a marketplace project. The transition from that, to the zine work was something I definatly wanted to experience. My main reason being, I wanted to help simply create a publication, submitt artwork, and see it sold at the end.

By all means, this has been a successfully met goal.

In terms of unit orginization, this year has definatly been far better organized, and far more free in terms of choice, giving us further paths to narrow down our choices of practice, which definatly has a big impact on our next year. This year, Unit X wasn't a flop.

The overall orginization by Desdemona and Rosemary has been fantastic. We have met far more people in the practice than last year's unit X, and personally I felt more involved with the overall spirit of the creation side of things. Ryan and Marchin, the ex graduates who now work in practice were also very handy when it came to teaching us about interesting visual cominations of type and image, giving us very handy tutorials in terms of possibilities we could take our project.

Despite this unit x being far more productive and better run, the only bad points were smaller details. I felt like I could of submitted to more Zines, and hopefully worked with new people, however due to early grouping issues at the start of the course, this knocked my confidence slightly when I struggled to find a group that I felt was really something I wanted to contribute to, which slightly affected my workload, combined witht he fact I commute into university, causing the "trip" problems I mentioned.

This however wasn't a big deal. Despite minor feelings of neglect on certain group decisions, I still feel like we all pulled together in the end to fully experience how artists really get out there and get themselves noticed.

Heck, I even heard from my group mates that a "random lady" from the zine fayre said she would take our left over zines at the end, if there were any left! I can't 100% guarrentee this, however that's a fantastic step foreward in terms of promotion of our practice to the outside world!

I really think that this time round, Unit X has given me far more information, experience and knowledge, and left me with actual distributed, sold artwork.

What's better than that?

If you have been following this blog, many thanks for taking time to read it. The work from this unit will deeply inspire me for the coming third year on Illustration.

- Harry Fryer