Zine Club

Zine Club is back at Thin Ice Press: the York Centre for Print on Friday 18 September. It's an evening of Risograph printing and zine making, run by the centre itself, and the whole thing is built around working as a group rather than on your own. You'll spend the session with inks, pens and collage materials, collaborating with everyone else in the room to produce a small, collective book. Once the pages are sorted, you'll prepare it for two-colour Risograph printing, so you get to see the process through from the first sketch to the finished print.

If you've never come across a Riso before, it's a bit of a hybrid between a photocopier and a screen printer. It uses soy-based inks in bright, overlapping colours, and the results have a distinct, grainy texture that's become a bit of a hallmark of zine culture. The beauty of the club is that you don't need to bring anything with you—the inks, pens and collage materials are all provided on the night, and you're working as part of a group, so there's no pressure to have a fully formed idea before you walk through the door.

It's open to all experience levels, and the session is suitable for beginners, so you don't need to be an artist or have any printing background to get involved. If you're more of a collage person than a drawer, you'll find plenty to work with. The collaborative side is a big part of it, too: you're not just making your own thing in a corner, but contributing to a book that everyone in the room has a hand in.

Thin Ice Press also runs Mini-Riso Club, a monthly children's workshop inspired by the weekly Riso Club for grown-ups, so if you've got younger ones at home who've caught the bug, there's a version for them as well. Zine Club is on Friday 18 September at Thin Ice Press: the York Centre for Print in York.