Posted on

Public Domain SVG’s

Here are the images I used for the creation of the Propp Cards.

I took a few Public Domain book illustrations (mainly from the British Library Flickr site), cleaned them up in Photoshop or Pixelmator then ran them through the iOS app Imaengine to create a vector file which I then used as illustrations.

To be fair I could have just used the images direct, but I like having the option of scaling the images – if they were to become a poster or HD image and I like the smoothing of the image the vector gives.

Anyway, these are as Public Domain as they were when they started – if they’re useful, use them!

Images in the gallery below are jpg’s for ease of display, please click here for the files.

Posted on

Propp Cards

I made these cards a while ago, but didn’t ever share them properly, so thought I’d post here with an update.

This is a deck of print and play cards based on the work of Vladimir Propp (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Propp). Propp analysed Russian folk/fairy tales to create a “morphology” – a defined set of narrative elements which appear in the tales. Not all elements were present in all tales and these have become a powerful aid to writing folk or fairy tales. You can probably think of these as a precursor to the Monomyth (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hero%27s_journey). I can highly recommend reading the Morphology of the Folktale.

You can download my cards by clicking here.

Print at high res, card backs are included as page 5 if you want to print the backs as well.

The cards have icons at the top: Propp’s symbol, the number of the function and the “act” in which it is commonly used.

I used public domain book illustrations (mainly as shared by the British Library om Flickr), converted to vector. I’ll make another post sharing these and the process in the near future!