Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Another Brick in the Wall: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Megan Yama (2016)

My narrative is based on a dream I had on the public school system and testing in regards to how much of a toll it takes on students. My story starts out with the protagonist and their peers with their identities essentially stripped away by wearing the same clothes and masks to hide their faces. This is because the testing system tests their academic memorization instead of their individuality. The story progresses to where the students are in a large room with testing material and it focuses on the progression of the emotions and stress that the protagonist goes through. The protagonist sees a student finish the test and notices another test being sent to the other student who finished. The protagonist realizes that it's just tests after tests so they break away from the norm and throw their test up to show that they are against the system.

I started off with a very simple layout of my comic because it's fairly straight forward. I wanted to show how intimidating the situation was so I took reference photos and made some panels abstract to portray the emotion. I used linear perspective to establish the testing room. We started with a physical paper layout then used a burnisher to transfer it onto the final paper. We used Genius Scan and transferred it to Illustrator. I have had experience with Illustrator beforehand and I knew I didn't like it. But I utilized the pen tool and my new favorite, the mesh tool and I have grown to like it a little more. I like how my comic turned out but I wished I was able to put in more details freely.
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