Exquisite Corpse Zine 

Putting new shoes on old-hat printmaking 

This printmakers wants to start an online magazine for the passion of his life—traditional, old-time printmaking—so it fits the age of digital reproduction. A way to achieve this is find a very old setting for the very old process and build on experience.

Like a battery

PrintmakingWorld Ozine is like a battery—it has potential. Electricity is stored in the battery, and it can drive something or light a bulb in a flashlight. However, I don’t see online magazines as being like what print magazines have been for the past couple-hundred years—since the days of Ben Franklin and Tom Paine. Their magazines (actually they compare to the modern ‘Zine better than today’s magazines) were part of a revolution, a spike in the history of printing, if you will.

The history of printing is important to creative visual and story-telling artists. All printmakers, book artists and graphic novelists know this, and we love it. We have a passion for it. Now we have an opportunity to meld our interests in a global online magazine. It is not a matter of quitting our devotion to handmade prints and making new designs for the tools to make prints and teach printmaking.

It is like putting new shoes on an exquisite corpse, starting with the old hat of traditional printmaking—and ending at the feet where magic shoes fly all over the world in the blink of an eye and bring faraway people and places to our computer screens, our mobiles, and our digital tablets. Does the shoe fit? Study the industry news from England and find out.

Rachel Bartlett: “Harness the PR and marketing potential for the magazine”

Not only does the experience help magazines build greater connections to their readers, and offer readers a hands-on role in the magazine's production – and therefore hopefully a highly relevant and appealing end product – but the magazines also enjoyed the "PR buzz" which came with the experience of doing something a bit different or innovative in the industry.

"It's a crowded market and magazines are not top of mind where media is generally concerned," Rai said. "Television and the internet are “sexier” than magazines, so you need to do things which get the attention of the advertisers, of the media, of people in the industry." He added that it also offered "marketing opportunity".

"If you want to be seen as contemporary, it's important to do contemporary things, not just look contemporary," he explained.

Old hat, new shoes

The Pike Place Market, in Seattle, Washington, is one of the oldest open markets on the west coast, so when it comes to “old hat,” what could be a better place to put on new shoes of the kind I envision for printmaking experiences via the PrintmakingWorld Ozine?