DEADEYE is a cowboy/western-themed fanzine for the Life Series, with a special focus on Season 6: Wild Life. This zine is an M-Rated project focused on landscapes, heat, and the beauty of the wild American west.
The fanzine is exclusively in digital-PDF format, and is not affiliated with any of the characters/respective content creators depicted. DEADEYE features the work of 22 skilled contributors across over 150 pages of illustration and writing!
And best of all, DEADEYE is now available for free over at itch.io!
Forsworn is a medieval-inspired project currently being planned by @grimoiregardens and the mod team that brought you @deadeyezine. This project will be a small, digitally-published, free-to-access zine focused on the bonds, brotherhood & betrayals between characters across MCYT SMPs and series. 🦢
⚔️Interest Check is here!⚔️
We're in the planning stages and eager to learn about possible interest for this project. Details, including a timeline, theme information and more, are to come soon! Interest check closes April 30th.
Follow @forswornzine if you filled out the form to stay tuned!
Hey cowpokes! 🌵 If you enjoyed DEADEYE as much as we enjoyed making it, we are currently planning something new and would love to hear if people are interested. Check it out! 🐎
Hello there! I am a hobbyist bookbinder (the same one that bound the MCYT couture zine! I'm being anon because Tumblr mobile wants me to use my private blog without any option of change) and I just wanna say that I stumbled upon the Deadeye zine some time ago oh my god it's so beautiful!
I'm thinking of binding the zine as a personal book, but that only works if the zine is in single pages and not in spreads. Is there any way of making a single-pages version of the Deadeye zine?
Howdy! 🌵 First of all we're so honored that you want to print and bind the zine! It's extremely cool to see folks engaging with our zine which was such a passion project for us.
We've spoken with our layout mod @bbugbearr and she's gone ahead and made an alternate version of the zine that has single pages instead of the spreads being connected.
You can download it from our itch.io page here. Let us know if you have any issues, and if you bind the zine we'd love to see pictures when it's finished! 💚
CARRD | FINAL ZINE | AO3 COLLECTION | GRIMOIRE GARDENS
Howdy! Was just wonderin' what programs y'all have used in formatting the zine🤠
Howdy! 🐴
Our incredible mod @bbugbearr used Adobe InDesign to put all of our pages together. Bea did all the heavy-lifting for getting it assembled and in one piece.
When making assets, spot illustrations, and fic title art for the zine, @renardroi used CLIP Studio Paint Pro (1.0) and @sillyfairygarden used Procreate. We've also used Canva for a couple of social media things and also putting together a rough draft layout for Bea.
We used these programs just because they were what we already had on hand! When you're making something that is really only for digital release, there's not as much need to worry about having the big brand programs. Prior to bringing Bea on board, we spent time researching options like Affinity (which was recently bought by Canva and is seemingly now free to download), and it's something we could use in the future. There's options out there, it just depends on what you can afford and how much you're willing to learn a new program.
CARRD | FINAL ZINE | AO3 COLLECTION | GRIMOIRE GARDENS
Howdy! The word count that I've got for the DEADEYE zine is just a bit over 43,000. However, the AO3 collection has over 46,000 words with authors' unedited/extended editions there. I definitely recommend checking both the zine and the collection. 🤠
CARRD | FINAL ZINE | AO3 COLLECTION | GRIMOIRE GARDENS
This zine turned out amazing!! I'm so sad I only found out about it after its completion as I would have loved to be part of it. Will there be another western themed zine in the future?
Howdy! Thank you so much!!
Currently, we don't have plans to make a second DEADEYE, but that's definitely not something set in stone. We picked the western theme for a good play on words (Wild West Life) and because we were inspired by the theme. The zine that came out of that is awesome, full of incredible art and writing, and feels like a complete project. I think if we return to DEADEYE in the future, it will be because we got inspired by a new aspect of the theme rather than making a direct sequel to it.
Folklore, knights, mythology - we've chatted about other themes like these, but we're definitely not settled on anything yet. Our main mods have had some big life events, so we're waiting for the dust to settle before we point our caravan in any one direction. You can always follow us over at @grimoiregardens to see what we work on next.
CARRD | FINAL ZINE | AO3 COLLECTION | GRIMOIRE GARDENS
DEADEYE is a cowboy/western-themed fanzine for the Life Series, with a special focus on Season 6: Wild Life. This zine is an M-Rated project focused on landscapes, heat, and the beauty of the wild American west.
The fanzine is exclusively in digital-PDF format, and is not affiliated with any of the characters/respective content creators depicted. DEADEYE features the work of 22 skilled contributors across over 150 pages of illustration and writing!
And best of all, DEADEYE is now available for free over at itch.io!
Etho rounded a corner and blinked, startling as he stopped dead. The figure was nowhere to be seen. He hesitated before looking down a darkened alley, just a stretch of dirt between two rickety storefronts. No one. Etho’s brows furrowed.
Without warning, a body crashed into him from behind, pinning him against the sun-bleached siding before he could blink. There was a tense and breathless shuffle that ended in one of Etho’s arms twisted up behind his back, and the other trapped between his torso and the wall itself. A hand slapped roughly over his sides, patting him down until it found his holster, and then scrambling under his coat to pull out the six-shooter, cock it, and point it at the back of his head.
“What do you want,” the figure behind him growled.
“Hi Tango,” said Etho, breathlessly.
READ ON AO3
LAST DEADEYE ZINE DROPPPP. This was a collab with the amazing the talented and the absolute dream team @eydilily and @panidanya whose art is inside the fic as well as here on tumblr: Eydi's pieces, Danya's spread
Thank you again to all the @deadeyezine mods and all the incredible contributors for making this the coolest project ever to be apart of!! So so proud of my artists and the thing we made together y'all are wonderful and it was such a treat working with you <3
my last piece for the @deadeyezine which is part of a three way collab! I got to illustrate the beginning of Where Iron Shines Like Gold written by @hitheeprithee, and the other half is illustrated by the incredible @panidanya🌒 please go check them out!
I was just wondering how you guys have created your logo for the zine! It looks so iconic and I want to learn more about you guys' thought process behind the zine:3
Thanks for the question! We don't have tons of documentation on some of our design process, and we were doing a bunch of things at once so some of the timeline of this is a little mixed up, but here's what we do have:
When we (Mod Thello and Mod Grim) initially chatted about the logo for DEADEYE, we were discussing both it and the logo for Grimoire Gardens, at the same time. This initial moodboard is just random stuff we threw out in our call. For this we were thinking about what a western/cowboy theme brings to mind as it pertains to a logo. We talked about cattle brands, we talked about dust and grit and texture, and we talked about our dual themes as a source of inspiration.
Crucially, you can see that a lot of this moodboard is not reflected in our final design. We're just compiling ideas and talking through it.
We ended up wanting to emphasize the dual themes more than anything else, so we talked about finding some way to incorporate both a sun and moon in the logo, and you can kind of see in the corner of that moodboard a crucial bit of inspiration.
Here are some early ideas Thello put down based on that discussion.
But we settled on this sketch that Thello made. It was just sort of correct right away. We did away with the moon obviously and just stuck to the sun branding.
Thello is just good like that. I blew the logo up, tried to get it big enough it could go anywhere, and tried to balance out the weight of certain parts. This is a screenshot of my early rough draft in that process.
The final draft of the D logo is fairly textured, though, and more rounded out.
Slightly rounded edges, trying to balance the weight of gaps between different pieces. I also made the executive decision to hide some gaps in the drop shadow, because they seemed distracting. This is a fairly messy logo, all things considered, but it's exclusively used for social media pfps and was never meant to be looked at up close.
Plus uh...oops, we do need the rest of DEADEYE not just the D.
Since the D was hand-drawn and didn't have a matching typeface to go with it, I messed around with a bunch of different typefaces trying to come up with something that would match and not cost a bunch of money to use. (I was delaying the inevitable conclusion, which was that the rest would have to be hand-drawn as well.)
(Typefaces pictured here are a very tilted Old English Text MT and Gloucester MT Extra Condensed respectively, just some default typefaces from CSP.)
The latter here is much closer to the vibe we settled on. I liked having the rest of the full logo to be sturdy, blocky and not too decorative as to draw attention from the D, but it also still needed to match the D so that nothing was obtrusively different. Which is why ultimately...I drew it all myself. The proportions are obviously very nearly the same, but I needed it to be thicker in some places, and pointier with the serifs so it didn't feel out of place next to the final D logo.
Here's a bunch of tests with colors. These aren't random, they were pulled from Thello's color palette suggestions and the lovely backgrounds that Thello had previously made. Here's an early test of how one of the painted backgrounds might look with a dropshadow (testing legibility of the logo):
Ultimately my favorite was the lovely little river though.
Even if it's not perfectly legible with the river, I think you're sacrificing a bit of that for just insanely good ambience. I love Thello's art. Here are the final assets:
Subtitle text is Averia. We ultimately decided to use this for all of our body text in the zine.
Thello has a great sense of design cohesion and had already designed a bunch of fun line breaks and extra cool things by this point. One of which we both fell in love with was the "coin" logo. This didn't really get used as a pfp anywhere, but was included in some of our social media announcement graphics!
Thello loves to just make stuff. Here's some more stuff Thello made:
A behind-the-scenes look at some of the (affectionately-titled) Clutter Graphics.
Basically, don't be afraid of iteration. Our logo was simple enough and easy enough to reproduce quickly by hand which made it fun to work with and reproduce to match a bunch of different things.
The other good thing about this project is that it's not a professional logo that we'll be using forever. Like the final D and full DEADEYE logos have way too much texture for modern business branding needs. If we wanted to make them more suited for something like letterhead, or putting on physical objects, we might need to simplify a lot more.
But this project is an illustrated, short-term (relatively speaking) project, so we get to be a little messy and fun with it! We didnt really have a "standard" that we adhered to strictly, we changed the logo as needed to fit whatever it was going on, and just did what was fun and exciting to us.
Hopefully that helps?! Feel free to ask us more questions about our process, though no promises on how quickly we can answer!
DEADEYE is a cowboy/western-themed fanzine for the Life Series, with a special focus on Season 6: Wild Life. This zine is an M-Rated project focused on landscapes, heat, and the beauty of the wild American west.
The fanzine is exclusively in digital-PDF format, and is not affiliated with any of the characters/respective content creators depicted. DEADEYE features the work of 22 skilled contributors across over 150 pages of illustration and writing!
And best of all, DEADEYE is now available for free over at itch.io!
DEADEYE is a cowboy/western-themed fanzine for the Life Series, with a special focus on Season 6: Wild Life. This zine is an M-Rated project focused on landscapes, heat, and the beauty of the wild American west.
The fanzine is exclusively in digital-PDF format, and is not affiliated with any of the characters/respective content creators depicted. DEADEYE features the work of 22 skilled contributors across over 150 pages of illustration and writing!
And best of all, DEADEYE is now available for free over at itch.io!
Martyn owes Scott a debt for taking him in, for trusting him to help run not only the Oasis saloon but the shady dealings he gets up to on the side.
That's why Martyn tries not to think too hard about the fact that he's orchestrating Scott's downfall.
Time keeps passing, Scott keeps looking at him like he knows something Martyn doesn't, and it all comes down to one moment.
When the sun is high in the sky and his plans finally come to fruition, will he finish what he started?
READ ON AO3
DEADEYE ZINE FICS PART TWOO.
This was ANOTHER collab with the beloved @eydilily who popped OFFFFF, please go check out their art here on tumblr as well as within the fic <33
another piece for the @deadeyezine! a lovely collab again with @hitheeprithee who wrote Tick Tock, which is just absolutely incredible please go read it !
the sanctuary by birrdie
3.6k, one-shot (complete)
my contribution for the @deadeyezine! I had the absolute honor of working alongside @taigarrryen who created a wonderful companion piece. if you haven't seen it yet, check it out here!
