A coloured pencil line is mostly gaps. Lean in close to one of Sue Jarman’s drawings and you find flecks of bare paper between the strokes, a scribble that doubles back on itself, a thumb smudge of charcoal along the edge of a hill. Those gaps are where the drawing breathes. Bury them under a glossy coating and they tend to flatten into something tidy and lifeless. Our task on Drawn Landscapes, Sue’s A5 landscape artist catalogue, was easy to say and fiddly to get right: print the drawings so they still look drawn.
Sue is an image maker, printmaker and designer with a studio at Digswell Arts in Hertfordshire. She draws from life, a habit her opening page calls ‘visual eavesdropping’, and this slim wire stitched zine gathers parks, harbours, hillsides and coastlines into one keepable object for collectors and open studio visitors. It belongs firmly in our catalogue printing for working artists, yet it threw up four separate problems on its way to press.
Pencil against sheen
Sue already knew the answer to the first one. She had printed an earlier zine with us on Arena E/W Smooth, a premium uncoated paper, and asked for it again. We agreed without hesitation.
Uncoated stock has no surface gloss to fight the drawing. Graphite and charcoal settle in with a soft, velvety darkness, and coloured pencil keeps its grain. The smoothness of Arena matters as much as the lack of coating: the finest scratches hold their edge instead of blurring into the fibres. Study the cover, a park scene of pink blossom, acid yellow foliage, one red bench and a sky built from loose blue scribbles. Nothing has been polished away.
If your own work lives in pencil, pastel, ink wash or charcoal, start the paper conversation with a smooth uncoated sheet. Our comparison of how silk, gloss and uncoated stocks hold ink puts the differences side by side.
Charcoal hills on a thin sheet
Problem two was weight. Sue wondered about a lighter cover paired with heavier inside pages, so we priced several combinations and explained how each would behave. Our advice ran the other way round: 250gsm for the cover and 140gsm inside.
The reasoning came straight from her drawings. Several spreads are dense charcoal hillsides running right across the gutter, and on a flimsy text weight that much black can ghost through to the page behind. At 140gsm the sheet is opaque enough to stop it. The 250gsm cover, finished with a matt laminate, has the stiffness to stand upright on an open studio table and to cope with plenty of browsing.
A panorama at a standard size
The third problem was money, and it hid inside the format. Sue’s earlier zine ran at a custom 155 x 220mm, and she asked whether to keep that size or switch to A5. We costed both. A5 sits efficiently on a press sheet, with more pages fitting on each one, so it came out as the cheaper route. Sue resized her artwork to A5 landscape.
Turning the page on its side suited the subject. Horizons, estuaries and ridgelines are wide by nature, and an A5 landscape spread opens to roughly 420mm across: a genuine panorama without the bill for an oversized book. Her layouts use every millimetre. Edge to edge spreads alternate with single drawings floated on white margins, a grid of tiny thumbnail sketches sits beside a sweeping coastal view, and a harbour with a bright red boat faces a small framed study. That swing between sweep and close study sets a slow, walking pace. One plain sans serif, used sparingly, keeps well out of the way.
Staples through the fold suit a book this slim, keeping it light, quick to leaf through and happy to lie open on a table. Weighing a custom size for your own catalogue? Check which standard formats print most economically before you commit; you may keep the look and lose the premium.
Thursday, before the open studio
The last problem was a date. Sue had an open studio weekend coming, and the zines needed to be there first. We sent a simple PDF export guide and the key set-up points for a wire stitched booklet, checked her files and turned a proof round quickly. She approved it promptly. We scheduled production around her weekend, agreed a delivery window that suited her, and the boxes reached her on the Thursday, in time for the weekend.
If you draw from life and want a catalogue of your own, take the decisions in Sue’s order. Settle the paper surface first, because it decides whether your marks survive. Size the text weight to your darkest spread, never your lightest. Test whether a standard format can carry your layout before paying for a bespoke one, and work back from your event date so the proof is never rushed. Once you have a rough page count, our online price calculator will give you a figure to plan around.
Once the zines were in her hands, Sue wrote to us.
“I have my zines, and they look fantastic. Thank you so much for doing such a great job and turning them around so quickly!”
Sue, the artist behind Drawn Landscapes
PaperbacksA5, 44 pages, perfect bound£246for 100
