Zine: 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, and neither could my Instagram poll. 😂 So both colors are available for $4 in my Etsy shop. Shipping is free in the U.S.

If you’re interested in reading about my process for this zine, keep scrolling. 🙂

White and blue covers for Vignettes From Camelot zine

Table of contents and first page of the zine, with "The messenger" as the first story.

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.

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 illustrations for the zine. On the left are black shadowy swirls that reach up from the bottom of the page. On the right is a castle drawn in gray with black line work.

Two illustrations for the zine. On the left is several trees and branches drawn in black. On the right is gray swirls and black asterisks to symbolize magic.

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.

A screenshot from Canva that shows two pages in layout. On the left is the castle illustration with text over it. On the right is gray swirls with text over them.

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.