Mari's Room: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Madeleine Zonana (2017)

This project helped me learn the ins and outs of Illustrator, how to visually show what I wanted, even though drawing is hard for me, and how to use color to evoke different emotions. At first learning Illustrator was hard for me, especially because I missed the first few introductory classes to the new software, but once I focused and used the skills that I had learned in Photoshop, I was able to feel comfortable and really enjoy working in Illustrator. Drawing has generally been hard for me because I am not very talented at it but I always want to draw very well. At first I spent a lot of time drawing and redrawing my different panels because I was to hard on myself and was focusing too much on details. Eventually, though, I was able to use what I could draw to get across the story that I wanted to. I didn’t worry as much about the details and drew shapes that would show the objects I wanted to use. When I started this project, I thought that I would use the colors that were generally associated with the specific thing I was drawing. During this project however, I learned that I could use lighter and warmer colors to show excitement and to use darker and colder colors to create a more frightful mood. By using color to create different tones, it helped get my story across. In the future I will use these skills that I have learned in Illustrator and apply the techniques with other software as well as the skills I learned about drawing and color.