Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Homesick to Sick of Home: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Michael Welch (2016)

My comic is about a kid who as a child was really afraid of leaving home. When he leaves for camp he is very scared and misses his home very much. When he finally returns he is overjoyed that he is back with his family. Later in his life, things have changed a lot. Both of his brothers have moved out leaving him to be an only child. He is crushed by responsibilities and all of the work that comes with being in high school. He gets fed up and decides to leave. He goes from being homesick to being sick of his home.

We started our illustrations non-digitally using our reference images from English. We focused on the rising action of our story for the more detailed Design illustration. After sketching what each scene might be, we transferred the rough drawings to butcher paper. After that, we transferred the larger images to poster board using a burnisher. I then added color and this was the final non-digital image. After that, we scanned the colored comic into Illustrator to make a digital version. In Illustrator, we used many different tools one of which was the pen tool. This one I used the most because it was the most versatile. Every line the is on the comic was drawn with the pen tool. The other tool I used a decent amount was the gradient mesh tool. This was a good way of adding texture without using the brush tool which would make the comic unprintable. If I were to do the project again I would try and use the gradient mesh tool more often to give more texture and a cooler look.
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