Big Brother: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Angel Austin (2016)

My Comic Illustration is about me and my relationship with my brothers. I am 16 and have four older brothers and a sister who is younger than me by 5 years. My relationship with them was very close due to the close age difference between my brothers and I. This illustration takes you through my childhood from when I was in first grade to me now as a junior in high school. The comic starts with an establishing shot of our house. Transitioning to her going into the house and walking down the hallway with her eldest brother. They come into this room where you see them playing video games. The next panel shows her change of moods. Everyone has different moods, but over the years my moods have changed significantly. In my comic I showcased the change of my emotions in this young girl. Connecting it to her teen years where she is sitting alone telling her brother to go away. Soon my oldest brother graduated from high school and went off to college. The others, always going off with his friends. I never meant for my relationship with them to fall apart, so I became a little sad. It's now junior year and my brothers and I are prepping for college. I'm happy that we are excited to move on and start this new chapter, but I can't help but wonder if our relationship will always be of us steering clear of each other or will we ever get back to that closeness we had when we were 6. So in the next panel it shows how this girl wants to fix things with her brothers. She messages him and he replies. In the end you see them all playing together just as if they were 6-7 again.

The process we used to create these illustration boards was a very long and tedious, yet fun process. We started by drawing our comics on a big sheet of graph paper. It was fairly thin so we could see through it. Next we mounted that onto a cardboard piece we called our illustration boards. Using a tracing tool called burnishers we pressed on the graph sheet and it created a faint line on the cardboard. We then outlined the lines we created with the burnisher and colored it in with sharpy. We then downloaded an app on our phones called Genius Scan. We downloaded the picture application called Adobe Illustrator. On Adobe Illustrator I used the pen tool to trace the panels that I drew and create all the little details inside of those panels. I also used little tools such as gradient and other swatches like skin tones and nature to help me color in the panels. Some problems I faced during the process of making these were that every single time we create something new in a panel like a window we have to create a new layer. This entire illustration has roughly around 60 layers. If I did not create these layers then I could not select a specific part of the picture and move the objects around for they were all connected into one big thing. I overcame this by making sure that I clicked a new layer as soon as I finished something. This process was frustrating at times partially because the computer was slow or because I am such a perfectionist that I couldn't move onto the next panel until I finished and changed every minor detail in that specific panel. On the contrary this project was so fun that I didn't want it to be over. If I were to do this again next time I will most definitely start with a easier panel and save the harder ones for the end. I am very proud of what I created and and amazed at how I moved from just a piece of graph paper to creating it on a computer.