Today, I combined two things that have been occupying a lot of my head space – making ink swatches, and making a zine.

I have been making ink swatches for years now, comparing different methods, working on different papers, using many techniques to get different outputs, and have settled on a default method that works for me. The result is a bunch of ink swatches living in different books and swatch collections, but nothing that I go back to refer to on a regular basis. This has been giving me a lot of pause – while I enjoy the process, the result is something that I do not go back to, or even share with the community as much as I would like to.

This is where the zine comes in. Making an 8-page zine from a single sheet of A4-size paper is not only easy, it’s also quite idiot-proof – it’s quite hard to get it wrong. It is also a lot of fun to make, and the technique is simple enough that it gets out of the way and lets you get on with the content of the zine itself.

For some time now, I have been thinking of making ink swatches in a zine format – a small collection of inks that live in a pocket-sized zine that can be easily carried around inside a traveler’s notebook or a techo cover. The small collection also makes it less intimidating for anyone who sees it – there are six inks and that’s it – no overwhelm of hundreds of swatches!

And today, I finally managed to make it happen. The themes was very simple and serendipitous – six bottles of ink I could reach from where I am sitting at my desk. Four of them have been living on my desk for a while and two more have been hiding in a box behind me.

I swatched them on Iroful ink cards – small A7 pieces of paper that are precut and come in a colourful box. I used my favourite swatching tool – a small metal spoon that allows me to swatch with precision and with almost zero wastage or mess.

I folded an A4 sheet of printer paper into an 8-page zine, and used a Uniball Zento to write in the details, and draw the front and back cover pages. Finally, I glued in the swatch cards and voila – my swatch zine was ready!