My narrative story is about a man who lives in the city all alone and longs to find love in his life but he is stubborn to accept what he has after he befriends a stray cat. With my story, I designed an illustration of my character in a setting. I also created an audio book in which I made and added music and sound effects to. With all of these things, I created this website. This was a huge learning experience for me because I learned and made new kinds of digital art forms. Even though it's not perfect, I take pride knowing that I created all of this and I gained so much knowledge from the experience.

The Napkin

Joe gets up in the morning, goes to work, listens to Sally, his cubicle neighbor, nag about how her husband won’t take out the trash, comes home, eats takeout and falls asleep on the couch. He’s tall and lanky and he wears a white button-up with a tie and a long coat when it’s raining. He has no one. One day, as he’s walking home, he hears a splash among the drizzling of rain. He slowly glances over his shoulder. Nothing. A small curiosity fills him. He walks faster. He hears another splash and whips around quickly. Looking up at him with big eyes is a scraggly, ugly cat. He doesn’t know why it’s following him, so he stares at it. He shakes his head and turns. He briskly walks through the cold New York streets to his small apartment on the 11th floor. As he starts up the long flight of stairs, he glances around and notices the cat has been following him. He whips his waistcoat and scares the cat a few paces away. He hurries up the stairs. And the cat is right behind him. Maybe it’s just hungry. He lets it in and offers it some leftover takeout on a napkin. It nibbles on the bits of food it is given and then leaves. The next day, it does the same thing. And for a week after that. Sally even notices that he looks a little more lively. But one evening, the cat didn’t follow him home. He never saw it. Nor the day after that. As he’s picking up takeout from the rundown shack on the corner, the waitress slides a napkin across the counter to him with his food. He grabs the bag and stuffs the napkin in and walks out. At home, he unpackages his food and notices some ink on the napkin. On it is a phone number. His heart leaps, thinking about the cute waitress with the tied back, curly, blonde hair. There’s a skip in his step the next day when he tells Sally all about it.

I wrote this story because I feel like finding love in this world today can be challenging for some people. But the truth is that there is always someone that will accept and love you no matter what like the cat that finds Joe. However, sometimes that is not what we are looking for and we ignore it until we lose it and only then do we realize what we had. And although life has its down moments, that opens new doors for us.

To create my illustration I learned that illustrating is a really important and powerful method of storytelling. It's one thing to read words on a page but it's much better when you can see a story in an illustration. In Illustrator, I created a hybrid animal to represent my character in my narrative story. I learned how to trace and draw in Illustrator to creat the animal and I learned linear perspective to create my background setting.

In the sketches for my character, I listed the characteristics of my character and chose animals that the characteristics could be represented by. Out of that, I created a hybrid animal. I ended up with the head of a donkey to represent my character's stubborness and the front legs of a wolf to represent his lonelyness etc. I sketched out my crazy animal as shown to the right.

I took photos that I could use as a reference for poses I would design my character doing

In my narrative story, Joe is lonely and longs to find love in his life. In a takeout diner he meets a girl who writes her number on a napkin and sneaks it into his order.

To create my illustration, I started by sketching my character and setting ideas out on paper then I started to design my character in Illustrator. I created my character with the head of a donkey because he’s stubborn, the front body of a wolf because he’s alone, the back body of a rabbit because he wants to be around others and the wings of an owl because he’s smart. Then I added the accessories of the costume, glasses and a tie. After my character was finished, I started my setting. Using one point linear perspective, I drew the diner with a menu board and a counter on the right and a window and two tables and a chair on the left, finishing it off with tile floor. I set the evening mood with deep purple walls.

I created different music themes for different parts of my story and incorporated them into my audio book. I made story theme music, my main character music and the story climax music.

This is my main character motif:

This is my story climax music:

This is my story theme music:

This is an exuisite corpse of my class's electronic dance music. EDM is all electronically created dance music. The part I composed starts at 1:05.

In my audio book, I read The Napkin with the music and sound effects I created in Pro Tools. The sound effects and music really add the the body of the story and allow the listener to enhance their experience.