“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, and neither could my Instagram poll. 😂 So I made both versions.

Two copies of a zine titled Vignettes From Camelot feature a drawing of a sword in a stone on the cover. One zine has a white cover and the other zine has a blue cover.

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.

A zine page featuring a table of contents on the left, with a story titled The Messenger on the right, discussing a young girl's development of a keen sense of truth.

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.

Two pieces of paper feature artistic drawings, one with black wavy lines and the other with a stone castle. Around the pages, a market, a pen, and brush pen are place on the table. Two different intricate pen drawings, one depicting a forest and the other abstract wavy lines with dots. Various pens and markers are place around the pages.

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.

Two pages of the zine. The left page has an illustration of a castle wall with flags. Black and white text boxes cover part of the castle. The right page has a story about a young girl, with wavy lines in the background.

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.