Free Printable 1/6th Scale Miniature Book Covers!

EDIT: YouTube video tutorial now up -here-!


I'd always intended to make Max and Juno some bookshelves so they could have things on display, and a while ago I did just that; cobbling together two wooden storage boxes into a kind of weird modernist...thing. It did the job for a while, but it wasn't really what I'd originally intended. A few days ago I made some new ones, using wooden storage boxes with added shelving I painted with acrylics and varnish. They turned out great, which was just as well, because they were the perfect size to hold all the miniature books I've made recently...

Recently I found a lot of vintage book covers online, and printed out a ton of them so Juno could have the Agatha Christie collection of her dreams. I hadn't scaled them all that well so they turned out a bit small and I told myself that next time I'd do better measurements.

I wanted them to have a lot of contemporary books too, not just vintage murder mysteries, but finding high quality covers proved to be a little trickier than I imagined it would be, not least because my own reading habits have been skewed somewhat heavily towards fanfiction in the last few years and I haven't bought a new book in forever and therefore don't really know what's on the market right now. I found a few online, and toyed with scanning the bookjackets of some of my own favourites but it was going to be a bit of a faff so I didn't bother.

With that in mind I thought why not just design my own? I had plenty of photos and artwork to work with, I was sure I could come up with a few good ideas!

Well.

It turns out designing book covers is far more addictive and entertaining than I thought it would be, and I ended up with over 40!

At first I just planned on making them really basic, with a nice front cover, spine and a generic blurb on the back, but the more I made, the more fun I had coming up with the blurb and little 'reviews' by random publications and readers alike. I found a few sites with book title generators which came in really handy, and there were a few covers that started out with just a random word and I had to find something that seemed to suit it, as well as a suitable font. That was the other thing I enjoyed a bit too much, sourcing fonts! Dafont has long been a favourite of mine for typefaces, and I dread to think how many more I added to my poor laptop during all of this! 😂 I'm not a natural at graphic design, and there are definitely a few I could have done better with, but then again, I've seen some absolutely shocking cover art on actual published books so it all adds to the accuracy. 😆

At first I just used my current internet handle 'Lynkhart' as the author, but as the genre of books expanded I thought it would look a bit weird to have the whole shelf full of books by the same person, so I found an online pseudonym generator to come up with random names. A couple are by David Allaway; a much beloved character I used with my Julip herd back in the day.

Anyway, enough of all that, here's the books!

Feel free to print these out at any scale for your own miniature books, but under no circumstances are they to be sold, edited or passed off as your own work.

Free for PERSONAL USE ONLY, not to be resold.

I made a PDF of all the ones so far if that's easier for some folk which can be found -HERE- but also included all the individual covers here on the blog if you only want a couple of specific ones. Bear in mind these are all large by default so you'll need to reduce them in size for smaller scales. I recommend printing the PDF on plain, but high quality photo paper at the best quality. I find photo paper doesn't fold quite so neatly though that's just my personal experience.

 

Now, I'm no good at scaling stuff, so I can only hope these have been reduced properly.  For 1/6th scale, I had them at 3.35 cm x 5.28 cm with the larger hardbacks at 3.63 cm x 5.73 cm, but obviously it depends on how big you want the books. I know most folk probably do things differently, but I always print my printables via PowerPoint, so I just resize the original high resolution images on there rather than altering the files themselves.

 

Just save whichever ones you want and paste them into Word or PowerPoint or something and print away! Cut them out, place a strip of clear tape over them if you want a nice glossy finish, then stick them onto strips of 3mm foamboard or thick card, with the spine flat along the edge, and cut them out with a scalpel for nice neat edges. I used double sided tape as it's far less messy than glue and you don't need to worry about the ink bleeding or anything. I also used leftover foamex and in some cases, old instruction manuals and ancient chequebook stubs for those I wanted to have real pages. 

I tried to make lots of different genres for a bit of variety, but Sci-Fi and Fantasy are my personal favourites so it leans heavily in those directions.

Sci-Fi

First up we have 'Neverlasting Elixir' - this one is pretty close to my heart as it's based on a character and story I've been working on for over fifteen years now. I actually have a 1/6th scale figure of the main character, Kes, I have yet to introduce, and I based this artwork on it. It's the closest to how I see him in my head I've ever managed to achieve.

The next two revolve around my droid character, who is still without a name of their own. I've always been a big fan of robots, and I was really pleased with these photos I'd taken of them - they make quite good cover images I think!

This one has a bit of a stupid title but it still makes me laugh. I did this painting yeeears ago, after finding a really good planet painting tutorial on deviantArt. I thought the composition looked a bit empty, so I decided to paint a big spaceship in the foreground to balance it out. Unfortunately I'm not great at mechanical things, and the resulting vessel looked rather...odd. (It was supposed to be a huge vessel with cargo bays I think) As I was finishing it off, I realised it bore an uncanny resemblance to Darth Vader's iconic helmet, so I put 'Darth Vader' through an anagram maker and The Draven Thread was born! 😂😂

Fantasy

I may have got a little carried away with these ones. 😂

The 'Shadow Series' is based on my OG Skyrim/D&D character, Skara, and her continuing quest to skirt the responsibility of being named 'the chosen one'. Just let her be a sneaky archer thief dammit!

I created her in 1/6th scale years ago and she's still one of my favourite figures even if I have yet to upgrade her outfit like I've been meaning to for the last five years.

These ones are based around another of my Skyrim characters, this time Brenn the spellsword. He left the life of a farmer behind in search of adventure and the arcane...and got into plenty of trouble on the way! The pictures are photo edits of my 1/6th scale figure of him and some of my Skyrim screenshots. There's one of wizard Breanna at the back there too.

 These two are my least favourite covers, but they look ok on a shelf I suppose. Just another generic fantasy series I suppose. They star Breanna, yet another of my Skyrim/D&D characters, but I'm probably going to make better ones for her in the future.

 

'The New Kind' came about by way of a D&D themed art prompt list, where you rolled dice to choose a race, class and theme to draw. I did this a while back and got 'Warforged Druid' as one suggestion which I really loved, as the idea of a purely mechanical being having nature based powers was really intriguing. Perhaps one day I'll play them in D&D, but for now, they exist purely in art form, and in this little book!

 

 

These two star my two current D&D characters - Veska, the tiefling bard and Wensley the human barbarian. Veska is my main character right now, while Wensley was rolled up randomly for a winter themed oneshot back in 2020...which we're still slogging our way through because we're useless, lol.

I imagine Veska's book to explore her backstory, while Wensley's just covers the adventure we're still on. The quote at the back is a direct quote from one of our past sessions that I found too funny not to include!

 

These ones are probably my favourite out of all of the fantasy ones. I took part in a drawing prompt thing a couple of years ago (an unofficial Inktober thing as the creator of that challenge is a bit of a dick) and had a lot of fun with a limited colour palette and gold paint.  

 

The 'Traitor of Time' and 'Scourge of Sorrow' ones were an homage to two of my favourite characters from Critical Role, Essek Thelyss and Caleb Widogast respectfully, (prompt words 'Epaulette' and 'Broken') while the other two were just interpretations of 'Hollow' and 'Dungeon'. The blurb on the backs has excerpts from some of my WIP fanfictions as they were a pretty good fit. When I came to put the books together, I went over the gold areas with metallic watercolour, then added the clear tape because I wanted that fancy gilded effect you see on a lot of books these days and thought it would be a nice little added bit of detail.

It's pretty effective!

 

Thrillers/Mysteries

These ones were some of the first book covers I made, and I wanted them to be in the Dan Brown vein of historical/supernatural thrillers. The first cover has a fancy snake doorknocker I saw once, the second is a jewelled skull I made for my Cabinet of Curiosities and the last is a bust I think I saw at the Wallace Monument forever ago.

I think this set is probably one of my favourites from the whole lot. I wanted to do some crime/mystery novels, and as I started writing the blurbs for these, I ended up coming up with a whole backstory for the main character and an actual plot, so there may be more to come in the 'Madison Mysteries'...👀

Essentially it's an ambitious detective sergeant who uncovers deep corruption in the police force and has to contend with that, as well as solving a series of grisly murders. Apparently it all takes place in coastal towns because of the covers so make of that what you will, lol

Generic Fiction

These ones don't have a specific genre really, they're just well, generic fiction I suppose. Some deal with dysfunctional families, others are about loss and coming of age stuff - I just winged it for most of them!

 

 

Romance/Cheesy Erotica 

 

  

 

These two are a little different, but I couldn't resist!

 

'The Rose and the Thorn' was a photoedit I'd done a few years ago for a fanmix I was working on, but never completed, and I thought it would make a good book cover. It looked like a romance novel so a romance novel it became! 'Naked Performance' however, is another story entirely!😆

Back in 2020, there was a wonderful photo show held while we were all stuck in lockdown, (the Pandemic Performance Panorama) and one of the many classes was called 'Naked Performance' 

For those not in the model horse hobby, 'Performance' classes are ones where you show the horse doing something, usually performing in one of the main disciplines - Showjumping, Dressage, Cross Country etc, but it also covers scenes and thing, unlike the 'Halter/In Hand' classes which are just about judging the horse by itself. The fun with this show was that all the creatively named classes were left entirely up to interpretation, so a lot of people showed their models 'naked' without paint, and there were a fair few other people with half dressed riders on horseback. I however, had another idea. A very generous friend had gifted me a couple of Phicen/TB League seamless figures a while back, and as I had a lot of mini resins I hadn't painted yet, and a nice looking sofa...well, it just had to happen. XD 

I ended up winning that class with this very photo and it's honestly one of my proudest hobby achievements! 😂 I'd quite like to do more of these, in the kind of incredibly tacky 'Mills and Boon' style, so watch this space! XD

 

 

  Pony Books!

If there's one thing I have a lot of artwork of, it's horses. I used to be active in the 'Horse Art RPG' community on deviantArt, so of course I had to make some pony books in the vein of the ones I grew up reading as a horse mad child. All the characters and horses are based on my Julips, and in hindsight I think it would have been way better to have them authored by the fictional yard owner, Abigail, instead of the apparently very prolific Lynkhart (aka me) but I can't be bothered going back and editing them again!

 

I also made a guidebook just for those taking part in NaMoPaiMo each year, especially those doing the 'Minis Painting Minis' thing!

 

 

 

 

 

So yeah, I hope you have fun with these! I'd love to make more so if there's any particular kinds of book you'd like in miniature, let me know and I'll see what I can do!

 

 

 

As previously stated, these are completely free to use, but please don't sell them or pass them off as your own work. If you're feeling generous, feel free to buy me a coffee via my Ko-fi link up at the top left of the page, but there's no requirement or anything. :3 

 

I'll leave you with some of my favourite photos from this bedroom shoot recently. I love this diorama so much, I just wish I could keep it up all the time!