Shefali Wardell talks to Natasha Knight about how alternative publishing and zine making can fuel artistic ambitions and reap rewards.
Forest Mushrooms, 2024
Based in London, Shefali Wardell is the founder of micro-publishing company, Pudding Press Ltd, focussed on Young Adult (YA) fiction, horror, and philosophy.
Self-described as an interdisciplinary drawing artist, writer, publisher and educator, Shefali is also a practising drawing artist and course leader for BA Illustration Online at Falmouth University. In balancing a range of disciplines linked to creative passions, she explains how charting your own creative path can help you discover a world of exciting opportunities.
Thanks for speaking with us Shefali. Could you tell our readers a bit about yourself and the work you do?
Thank you for inviting me along. I have been drawing for around 30 years, although in various roles because I like to try out different things all the time. It also took me a very long time to work my own practice out and realise I had settled into having my own visual language.
Zines have a wonderful and rich history, and one of the things that inspires me is that they offer an accessible entry point for both audience and illustrators.
Would you tell us a little about your day to day work and how you make these different streams work?
I would like to say something helpful and instructive here but I have to be honest that it can be a little chaotic at times. I have never been someone who likes routines and work best being flexible. Probably my most regular thing is my course leader role these days, and it’s a truly wonderful role for me because there is a lot of variety. I manage this through an online diary that tells me exactly where to go and when. The rest of the time is divided up between what I want to do, what is feasible and where there is an approaching deadline. It wouldn’t suit everyone but I am naturally quite a results oriented person, so tend to be able to focus. I also like to move around locations, and apart from my work desk I don’t really like being in one fixed studio space. It took me many years to find both opportunities that allow for this way of working and also to embrace it as being ‘normal.’ Despite this, people I work with tell me I am very productive but I think it is just that all the variety stops me from ever being bored or burning out.
Getting started in publishing can feel daunting for some, however, zine making has long been an accessible form of expression for creatives. What keeps you inspired about this form and what should illustrators know about how this can help to facilitate their work/ambitions?
Zines have a wonderful and rich history, and one of the things that inspires me is that they offer an accessible entry point for both audience and illustrators. I grew up in the ‘80s and I was about 10 when I first announced that I wanted to have my own fashion magazine. My father, who was actually a master printer, told me that you need to be a millionaire to own a magazine and he was semi-correct. He evidently was at the slick end of printing and not interested in zine culture himself, though I found out later that he had actually been a regular contributor to a indie political magazine in the 1960s. This was a case in point because they all had other jobs but could write, photocopy and distribute this very basic paper magazine affordably. This suits illustrators, writers or anyone who might have a less than mainstream audience. Niche subjects and obsessions really find their communities here, and of course it is something you can do with your practice to produce quality work that isn’t prohibitively expensive. You can even make a small profit, or use a zine to promote your practice. The other thing that zines offer these days is a material counterpoint to the digital and that can’t be underestimated as we are all rediscovering how nice it is to have something papery.
We need alternative publishing to be visionary and inspiring now. There are so many challenges but…we should be building a better new model to make the things we don’t like obsolete.
In the end I decided to become a mainstream publisher with Pudding Press Limited butI still use zines for single ideas and niche projects. Lots of academics do this, and in 2023I published an essay titled Humans and Aliens in zine form. It is about my experiences of growing up with mixed heritage in the UK against a backdrop of late 20th Century TV science fiction. It goes with a few other artworks I was doing, and it had no place elsewhere but a zine format gave it a contained home. Illustrators who also enjoy research or topics that aren’t mainstream can have fun producing work this way without it being to high stakes.
Humans and Aliens 2023
Currently, the mainstream publishing industry and wider illustration sector are seeing a number of significant changes, which impact on the industry but also freelance creatives. What can alternative publishing offer illustrators that differs from more traditional models?
We need alternative publishing to be visionary and inspiring now. There are so many challenges but like Buckminster Fuller said, we should be building a better new model to make the things we don’t like obsolete. There are a few perspectives on AI, and I’m not anti, but there are obvious problems. I think alternative publishing can offer a space to support human illustrators and the industry in general. As independents our budgets have always been tiny, so we have less to fear than the bigger companies who don’t know how to operate without throwing millions of pounds at a project. This agility should in theory lead to innovation.
Niche subjects and obsessions really find their communities here, and of course it is something you can do with your practice to produce quality work that isn’t prohibitively expensive
I am also a big believer in creative practitioners starting their own projects. I started my company because I wanted to be the one making decisions. It doesn’t suit everyone, but the more of us who get involved in the business side of the industry the better.
What is your dream project, past, present or (potentially) future and why?
So many but my current dream project is launching a boutique literary festival in 2027. It is currently in development and will be everything I always wanted from a dream event (including personal vampire assistants, a comics village and live theatre) but everyone who works on it will also get paid properly. This is unusual in the arts and is something you can only do with a commercial model, so I am now at the stage of just wanting to do it to prove to the world how great the UK arts industry could be. Extreme hubris maybe but I felt that if we could make it happen it would prove something. I am currently working on infecting other people with my enthusiasm for this.
With sincere thanks to Shefali for speaking with us. To find out more about Shefali’s work visit:
The Enchanted Forest Substack / Newsletter – free to subscribe or read for free without a subscription. Talking about drawing things, writing and arts industry, education matters as well as an occasional look at Shefali’s informal research.
