Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Little Red Bike: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Maximillian Raschke (2016)

My story is pretty simple. It's about a boy riding his red bike that comes across a hill and decides it would be a great idea to ride down it on his bike. So he begins to walk his bike up the steep hill. Ending with the boy looking down the steep hill about to go down.

The process of creating my comic started with learning about linear perspective. In Design class I learned the basics of how to draw in one and two point perspective. I practiced by sketching rooms and streets in my sketchbook. This was all to fulfill the requirement to have one panel in the comic make use of linear perspective. After sufficient practice I created the second panel; a long dirt road with a brown fence. My story came from the graphic novel I created in English class. Using the novel as inspiration I began experimenting with how I should layout the panels of my comic. I drew each panel on wax paper then used a burnisher to engrave each panel onto an art-board. Once I had fully finished the art-board I used Genius Scan to make the art-board into a PDF that I could transfer into Adobe Illustrator. Using the art board as a background I traced out each panel using the pen tool. I used the mesh tool to create some different gradients to make the comic more interesting. The most difficult part of my comic was the final panel. I tried to make it a first person perspective of the boy looking down the hill. It came out alright but I wish It had more depth to make it seem like the curve of a path down a hill. I'm glad that the boy came out well as I don't draw people very often. One thing I wish I could have added was some texture to the grass so it doesn't look like a wall of green. Overall I'm proud of how it came out. I learned a lot of new Illustrator techniques and I can't wait to try them out on my next Illustration.
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