Back in 2008, in my senior year of high school, I was involved in a teen mentorship program at the Minnesota Center of Book Arts. As a small class we met a few times a week to learn about bookbinding, screenprinting, letterpress, paper-making, and all sorts of great stuff like that. I was disappointed to hear that funding was cut recently and they’re no longer running the program because it was a very memorable and rewarding experience for me. One of the best things that came out of it, though, was that it awakened my love for making zines! During our zine workshop we made a zine together as a class. I enjoyed it so much that I decided to make my own. After lots of old-fashioned cutting and pasting of found imagery and my own pictures, drawings, and stories, I took the disgruntled mess of a zine (which became known as The Flood) to a print shop to make 50 black-and-white copies which I then sent all over the world as mail art using a list of addresses that had been supplied during the workshop.

What I got back astounded me. While my dad’s mail contained the usual bills, catalogs, and junk mail, I was getting mail art from Japan, France, Switzerland, all over the place! It was a pretty incredible experience to come home from school and rip open an envelope with a foreign language written all over it addressed to me and a cool drawing or postcard inside.

Two years have passed since then and I have always thought that I would make another issue, but it never actually happened. The Flood became a blog dedicated to featuring art I came across that inspired me. I went away to an art university in Vancouver and got too busy. However, during this last semester (I recently withdrew from the school) I decided to make use of my newly-acquired knowledge of graphic design software and the swarm of talented students all around me and create a second issue digitally and in full color featuring the work of my comrades and people I met during my time in Canada. This second issue is almost completely finished and ready to send off to the printers, so I thought it could be kind of cool to make a post about the issue that started it all!

Below are some selected pages from The Flood #1 in their original cut-and-paste form. Keep in mind, though, that I had known from the beginning that the final reproduction would be in black-and-white so I didn’t pay attention to color so much as tone and some of the tiny paper cut-outs have been lost over the years. Click to view larger.