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nova_dergsYeehaw! It’s been busy over here - artfight started (it’s our 10th year participating! Our username is RuffledGryphon), HowlCon recently opened for attendee registration, and we started the page design work on our Draconity zine.
We’re so proud of what we’ve cobbled together so far that we want to share it! Ignore the text, it’s content from last year that we left in as placeholder.
The artwork we made for the cover took forever. We don’t regret it and we love what we’ve done. However, next year we’re gonna limit the design to like 4 dragons lol. It was so big that we had to slice it in half (front and back cover). But since we needed imagery for the letter from the editors section we had an easy place to put the full image for viewing.
The idea for adding the quote came from Orion Scribner who shared it once in a discord chat and we’ve never forgotten it. We really want to promote the vibes of “all dragons welcome” and this quote just fits that so well. We’re not the dragon police afterall – as long as someone feels like the label of “dragon” fits their experiences we want to hear from them!
“Alterhuman Made” icon was made by us (and we’ve slapped it on all our zines since creating it and our Alterhuman Art blog). Fun fact: The hand-written font was created by Daski. It’s deir handwriting that dei turned into a font!
The color palate for this year’s Draconity is dark purples, oranges, and reddish pinks. We know we have the exact palette somewhere, but we can’t find it rn. It’s hiding somewhere in our files on our desktop computer. Not sure if we want to keep the sky/cloud theme through the entire zine. It’d be cute, but it would be more fitting to add more tabletop gaming elements to match the cover instead. If we can find a good image for the background of the table of contents we’ll likely switch it.
At the time of writing this, we’ve received a couple entries and have also added them to the zine draft. In total, the draft is currently 25 pages long.
We struggled with what to add for our own entry. In the past we’ve always added something ourselves - in Modern Draconity it was a mock social media exchange and in My Gender is [NOT] Human we submitted an updated coat of gender + artist statement.
Unfortunately, with all our other projects going on, we don’t have a ton of time to create something. Some of the options we thought of were: photos of our hoard of enamel pins, 3 Heads One Brain Cell comic strip, and digging up something we’ve already made to include.
We did the last one.
Ok but hear us out. First off, we do allow previously published work into the zine, so it’s not like we’re sneaking it in. The only stipulation is that the work cannot have been previously featured in a zine. The point of this rule is to keep ppl from submitting the same work year after year – we want each edition of Draconity to be unique.
However, we don’t care if it was put up on someone’s website or socials before. The two pieces we selected, one image and one essay, were each going to be placed in other zines before both the zines were cancelled. So, we’ve been left standing here awkwardly holding them. If you follow us on tumblr, you might have seen them before.
Here’s our artwork:
And this is a link to the essay we wrote. It’s a short piece about what it feels like to be a hydra titled, “Me, Myself, and I: When I’m you, but also me.” We will be giving it a once over before adding it, we know there’s a few areas we can tweak to make it flow better (and update our system count oops-) but we feel like it’d be cool to include. There’s not enough hydra content out there, nor enough otherlinker content for that matter!
It feels good to finally get both pieces into a zine! They even kinda fit well next to each other since they’re both about being a hydra.
Anyway, obligatory promo: If you or someone you know likes community zines and are/is a dragon please consider submitting to Draconity 2025! Info doc here.