The Rescue: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Isabel Martynenko (2016)

This story takes place in the future, in a world recovering from harmful human activity. Robots and humans roam side by side so that mankind can have assistance at every move. But now humans have advanced enough to leave behind unnecessary robots on planet Earth like the main character; a defective care-taking drone. This abandoned robot is on a small task to help a human girl who's been left behind and has fallen hard and injured herself.

The process of creating this comic all started with picking out the main shots from scenes of the rising action to this story. I narrowed it down to seven panels before organizing their arrangement and shapes to make the layout more interesting. It was important to remember to use different linear perspectives in at least five different panels, so that was always in the back of my mind. The first step was to sketch out this comic on an illustration board which would later be inked and colored. Then, I completely covered it in graph paper to carve in the artwork with a burnisher. After the illustration board was complete, I used an app called Genius Scan to get a scanned version of my artwork into Illustrator. I made it my bottom most layer before covering it with a black filled layer for the comic's actual background. From there, I created one hundred layers in total to complete this illustration. Even though I often got lost with this number of layers, I organized each one into folders for individual panels in the correct order. It was important to me that I stuck to the same color palette for the characters and backgrounds in the comic. It would have gotten overboard if I used too many colors for a single comic illustration. Overall, I am quite satisfied with how this turned out due to the overdramatized angles in different panels.