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We printed off photos we'd taken on research trip and secondary photos for our project and collaged them together to help us form ideas.

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While considering what my final outcome might be, I wanted to see how it would be to print a longer booklet in risograph that required separating the pages across separate sheets. I returned to my King Arthur comic from second year and picked out 16 core pages from it to print. I found this process incredibly complicated and difficult, and ended up running into someone else's booking because of how long I took to prepare the files. I was able to make it successfully, with all 16 pages in order, but decided against doing a similar booklet for my final outcome.

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The final postcards, in intended order and laid out in grid planned for The Final Show

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The final postcards, in intended order and laid out in grid planned for The Final Show

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-Don't be too caught up finalising pages and producing zines, becoming restrictive

-Go bigger and rougher, keep up sketchbook work but don't be confined by it

-Big posters of characters and happenings

-Go rougher, rice paper, brush and ink

-Bigger doesn't mean more detailed, can be big strokes

-Still images to garner interest, like how media will have images they're known for/represent them, I.E Joker becoming Joker poster

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Overall good. Maybe focus more on using Photoshop? (not said but hinted at) and work more in colour.

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Arthur, Lady of The Lake and boy play a board game

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Arthur, Lady of The Lake and boy play a board game

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Arthur and Lady of The Lake play video games

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Arthur and Lady of The Lake play video games

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Morgana and Mordred (who is in time out)

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Morgana and Mordred (who is in time out)

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Arthur reading a book on Arthurian Legend

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Arthur reading a book on Arthurian Legend

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After the final checkpoint, I felt lost on what to do next. I turned to collage as a fun and comforting art form. I found myself creating collages about King Arthur and the history of the legend. Without meaning to, many of the collages touched on themes of identity and conflict, specifically between Arthur and his son/enemy Mordred. I looked at the work of collage artist Hannah Hoch for inspiration. I particularly liked the way she layered the images over of one another in a very cohesive way.

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For the storyboarding workshop, we had to create a page for each sentence of a paragraph we were shown. The story was revealed to us in these segments, so we often had to edit our previous pages so that they better matched the story as we learnt about it. We were encouraged to use as few panels as possible to tell the story, but I decided to go the opposite way. I liked laying out the many panels and creating movement across them. It was a fun workshop and it got me to think more about storytelling solely with visuals and without text.

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Morgana attempts to revive Arthur, as they need another player

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Morgana attempts to revive Arthur, as they need another player

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Arthur awakes to a world he doesn't recognise

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Arthur awakes to a world he doesn't recognise

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Merlin puts Excalibur in the donation bin

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Merlin puts Excalibur in the donation bin

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Arthur searches for Excalibur in the shopping centre

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Arthur searches for Excalibur in the shopping centre

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Morgana taunts Mordred while he's stuck in time out

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Morgana taunts Mordred while he's stuck in time out

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Arthur considers the purchase of a new round table

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Arthur considers the purchase of a new round table

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Mordred kills time playing Dungeons & Dragons

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Mordred kills time playing Dungeons & Dragons

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Because the postcards were so successful, I decided to create my zine for the final show in risograph as well. I wanted to combine different types of imagery I had created as part of my project so far.

I decided to incorporate typographic elements, but created these by hand with a calligraphy pen, to give them an aged and worn look.

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One thing I noticed from watching people interact with my work was people struggled to refold my zine back in the correct order. I hadn't considered this. I enjoyed the less conventional layout of the zine, but less conventional came at the cost of less user accessible. Going forward, I kept this in mind with how I would create my final outcome.

During client feedback, I was advised to consider how I might propose this story to a publisher, rather than focusing immediately on self-publishing. I was advised against completing the comic, as publishers may like control over the content, and instead expanding my work around the concept of the story. Another client spoke with me about the choice of colour and the use of teal in the work. Overall it was very helpful and influenced the direction I took the work after the exhibition.

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During a digital skills session, we went over the character design and storyboarding workshops. This session taught me how to use guidelines in Photoshop, which was incredibly helpful for how I can format my comics. We were then asked to create a small story across 9 panels showing our character design. I went with a skateboarding dinosaur because I thought it would be funny. In discussions with the tutors about it, we talked about the use of pacing to make the punchline work. They pointed out that taking out one of the middle panels, and instead adding an extra panel before his roar building up to it, could have a stronger impact.

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For a digital skills session, we were taught how to mimic the look of screenprinting in Photoshop using pen and paper. This involved drawing the colour blocks individually and then layering them digitally. For this, I once again used the dinosaur character from a previous digital skills session. I enjoyed this session and messing around with the colour layering. However, I found it a little clunky to work with and decided that I did not want to use it for this project.

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To help with illustrating the final postcards I took many reference photos, getting my friends to pose for me. I based some of these on thumbnails I had already done, and others on ideas I had in my mind. These happened across many days, as I continued working on the final postcards and discovering I needed more reference photos. While I ended up using most of them, a few photos were based on concepts that I later decided were uninteresting or didn't make sense and got cut out, like the ATM photo.

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Arthur searches for Excalibur in the shopping centre

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Arthur searches for Excalibur in the shopping centre

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(Unused) Arthur discovers a massage machine

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(Unused) Arthur discovers a massage machine

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Merlin puts Excalibur in the donation bin

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Merlin puts Excalibur in the donation bin

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(Unused) Sir Kieran shows Arthur how an ATM works

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(Unused) Sir Kieran shows Arthur how an ATM works

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Arthur on a lift (Mordred in background)

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Arthur on a lift (Mordred in background)

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Arthur considers buying a new round table

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Arthur considers buying a new round table

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While I had mostly created the Arthur lino cut for fun, lots of my peers complimented it and so I returned to lino cutting. This time I based it on a landscape illustration I had created. With this print, I physically cut the board into two, separating the land and the sky. Once I finished the carving I inked each separately and then combined them for the printing process, allowing for a dual colour lino print. While unintentional, over-inking my board resulted in lines that added texture to the stones.

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The common room had lino printing equipment readily available, so I decided to give it a go. I had originally wanted to recreate The Lady of The Lake watercolour I had done early into the project, but I found this too detailed and fiddly to create in the medium. I instead went for a side profile of King Arthur, as well as writing his name. I really liked the texture of the paint and the carved lines, and felt it gave the work a more ancient look that suited the subject matter. I went back to the lino cutting and added a background, a line based pattern I've added to my work occasionally throughout the project.

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I went on a second research trip to The Tower of London, as a friend had given me free tickets to get in. Despite growing up in London I'd never been and it was a fun experience finally seeing what was inside those walls. I enjoyed the multiple museums inside, especially the museum of arms & armoury. While the castle is old, it didn't have anything dating back as far as Arthur's era.

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After the exhibition, I created more sketches and work of the characters having personalities. I wanted to think about how they would interact with the modern world and with each other. Would they have a sense of humour? Would they adapt or struggle to get with the times? As I went about my life, I would sketch the characters in the scenarios I found myself in, like waiting at a bus stop or on a train. These made it feel like the characters were following me around, and helped make it easier to imagine them in these real world settings.

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During feedback in the final checkpoint, I was asked about my decision to create posters. When I explained what one of the client's feedbacks had been during the portfolio session, I was pressed on whether I was doing what I actually wanted to do. I realised I had gone off-track, focusing too much on what I thought could make me look better to a potential employer and not enough on creating the story I wanted to tell. After this checkpoint, I decided to create a compromise, between creating a comic and creating posters.

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I considered how Arthur might appear in a modern setting, and went around sketching locations I thought could work. A back road I thought looked like it could be magical, a park that could act as a training ground, or a local pond as The Lady of The Lake's new home. Overtime I experimented with more fictional locations, like the large stones and the bedroom with Excalibur. I found it fun to set this story in a world similar but not exactly like ours, instead a world more steeped in mythology.

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After going to Bishopsgate, I went with a friend to the big Forbidden Planet in Central London, the dream place to be for a comic book nerd. I had more fun here as I wandered around drawing people and objects. We'd been told to create a narrative with our illustrations, so I gave speech marks and added commentary to the things I was sketching. Going to Forbidden Planet did make me think more about the fantasy and fictional direction, rather than the nonfiction of Bishopsgate.

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At the beginning of this project we had to do a research trip. I was advised to go to Bishopsgate Archive, an LGBTQ archive near Liverpool Street. It was a very cool experience being in there, surrounded by old writing. I hadn't prepared anything and once I arrived I discovered they expect you to have something in mind to look at. I wound up looking at German media about queer people across history. It was interesting reading but it didn't spark any ideas in me in terms of what to do with this project.

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For the 'work in progress' exhibition, I decided to create postcards. To start this I made a bunch of rough sketches for potential postcard layouts and ideas. I focused on specific characters in each, and then on situations. I cut this down to just four designs which all involved Excalibur Sword, as I liked having something tying them together. I created the line art by hand with pen, then scanned and coloured them digitally. In riso, I printed them with 4 colours- yellow, pink, aqua blue, and black.

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Le Morte D'Arthur by Sir Thomas Malory is one of the older Arthurian writings that forms the basis of many later adaptations of Arthurian legend. It was fascinating reading the source material and seeing clearly which scene were reinterpreted in other work. I also realised how wordy this original is, with a lot of excess dialogue that, as a modern reader, feels clunky and unnecessary. It was interesting how much of Arthur's personality carries through, as a humble and at times blindly angry character.

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I read The Worlds of Arthur, a book comparing the evidence for and against historic Arthur. It was a really helpful as it put the King Arthur legend into the historic context of 6th century Britain and the cultural shifts happening at this time. It also went through and broke down the key early works that form most of our modern understanding of the legend. Key points were around the Saxon migration and the tensions this created with the Britons, who lost more and more land on the island. It also explained how historically, tales were intended less to be accurate and more to be moral tales.