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Mythical Type

Vignettes From Camelot

“Vignettes From Camelot” includes glimpses into the lives of Arthurian characters: Merlin, Morgana, Arthur, and an unnamed messenger.

The zine is 16 pages long with 4 original stories and hand-drawn illustrations inspired by nature and magic. It’s printed in black and white. I couldn’t decide on a blue or white cover. so I made both versions.

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White and blue covers of the zine, Vignettes From Camelot

The stories in this zine started as a series of tweets I wrote a few years ago. My original idea was to write 10 tweets in a thread and have that be one story about people in Camelot. I never finished that, but I took the ideas I had for Merlin, Arthur, Morgana, and a messenger and fleshed them out into these vignettes.

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Table of contents page and the first story, which is about a messenger.

I drew the illustrations by hand using black and gray markers and pens. I wasn’t sure which illustrations would go with which stories, so I drew each page individually. Here are a few of the original illustrations.

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Hand-drawn illustrations. The left page is vertical, squiggly lines. The right page is a castle wall.
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Hand-drawn illustrations. The left page is trees in a forest. The right page is curvy lines on a starry background.

When I finished all the illustrations, I scanned them so that I could do the layout digitally.

I used Canva to lay out the text and illustrations. I made many of the illustrations semi-transparent so that the text over them was readable. In some cases, I put white boxes behind the text, so that the words stood out without adjusting transparency on the illustration. Here are two of the pages in Canva.

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A screenshot that shows two pages in layout.

After I laid out all the pages, I did a few test prints to see how everything looked on paper. I made a some adjustments, and then printed several copies for my Etsy shop.

fiction zines