Complicated Simplicity: A Junior Narrative Illustration by Christopher Lanman (2013)

For this the narrative unit I created a narrative illustration from my narrative I wrote in English class. The illustration was primarily based on the main character from my narrative, Brett Bocci. Instead of literally depicting Brett in my illustration, I chose to represent him with a stop light. Brett constantly struggles to make decisions because of his obsessive compulsive disorder of over analyzing every situation. Since Brett is so analytical in all that he does he lacks all confidence and trust. While it's clear that in my illustration the crosswalk signal signals a man, showing that it is safe to proceed across the street, Brett cannot proceed. He is too afraid of what might happen to him if he crosses the street, which is why I made Brett a stop light shining red. Although the average human being would walk across the street with no doubt in his or her mind that they couldn't make it across safely, Brett comes up with an amalgam of things that might happen to him if he does trust the signal. In the process of making this piece, I first started by getting a background image of an intersection for the setting of my illustration. Then, I traced the photo of the intersection using the pen tool. Also, for the first time, I used the type in an area tool to include typography in my piece. As you can see the words on the pedestrian pathway say pusillanimous, meaning lack of courage and a lack of courage is one of the main reasons why Brett functions abnormally. Besides from just using the the fill tool to color in the illustration with different colors, I also learned how to use the gradient tool to depict the illusion of dimension in the illustration.