History of He-art

Preparation Stage

It’s important to check all materials and place them in appropriate spaces where each participant can be free to use them, so as to create a good workshop.Try to find out a room with tables and chairs to provide a comfortable environment in order to put the ideas of the participants into practice. The tables has to be placed in a circle. A timer can help the facilitator to manage the time during the workshop implementation.

The workshop

To start the workshop, each participant has to take one piece of paper and a marker and to sitin a circle. In this workshop there are “no rules” to follow, except for following the time indication given by the facilitator. The topic of the workshop will be “drawing your favourite place on earth” or “drawing a special moment of your life”. Each participant will have 5 minutes per side to complete the book.

The facilitator will illustrate the basic steps to create a book[1] with only paper and give the participants the following instructions:

1. Fold and cut a piece of paper that will be the skeleton of the book to be illustrated.
2. Place a piece of paper on a flat surface, fold it in half lengthwise until the longer edges meet up. It’s possible to use an A4 paper or any kind of thin rectangular
3. Fold the paper in half again, this time so that the short ends of the paper meet, making sure that the corners line up evenly.
4. In order to make the final paper, fold the paper in the same direction as the last one to make a vertical fold.
5. Unfold the paper and lay it flat on a cutting mat. The result will be a paper divided into eight parts with one fold dividing the paper horizontally and three folds dividing it vertically.
6. Make a horizontal cut through the horizontal fold, starting at the point where the horizontal fold intersects the leftmost vertical fold, and ending at the point where the horizontal fold intersects with the rightmost vertical fold.
7. Fold the paper horizontally so that the longer edges of the paper meet together. This should create two-layered strip of paper with four sections.
8. After you fold your paper horizontally, you should notice that the double-layered strip of paper you have has the slit you made running along the top of the middle two sections. This makes it possible to push the two ends of the paper together to form a sort of “mouth,” that also resembles a plus sign when viewed from above.
9. Fold the top and bottom legs of the plus sign over to the right, so that they surround the right leg.
10. It’s possible to see that there is still one leg of the “plus sign” that is to the left of the other pages. Fold this leftmost page clockwise. In this way you will have a booklet with four pages ! Crease the spine of the zine with fingers to ensure that it keeps its shape.

After the creation of the skeleton, the facilitator asks participants to think about the topics for 5 minutes and create a bullet point with their ideas for each page. After this pragmatic moment, the facilitator will set up 5 minutesto decor/illustrate or draw each side of the book. The last side should be the cover and for its creation will participants will be provided other 5 minutes.

At the end of the workshop, the facilitator asks participants to take one moment of self-evaluation, thinking about “what was meaningful for me” in a sentence.

Learning Outcomes

Participants can achieve the following learning outcomes:

• Learning and excelling in the process of creating a zine
• Expressing their self, using materials and methods to which most people are not accustomed to.

[1] Wikihow, Make a Zine, https://www.wikihow.com/Make-a-Zine, last access September 2018.