The Game: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Nathan Lutz (2016)

My story depicts a fictional moment during the time period of World War II, on top of a roof where a sniper lays. It is quite suspenseful, being that the moment in itself could have ended a World War. The rising action in the story becomes very tense before the climax. The story developed and changed a lot over time, and I had difficulty deciding how it should end.

The process started with the story that we wrote in English, the Flash Fiction. From the Flash Fiction, I came up with the images which I wanted to depict inside of my illustration. We made two options for each panel, and therefore had a greater variety to choose from. First came the pencil sketches, which were pretty simple to create, being that there was no color. I realized that I wanted to focus on doing multiple close up shots to emphasize intensity. Next I turned the simple sketch into a full-size paper model that was the same dimensions as the final product. Next, we outlined that in Sharpie, including all of the borders. After that, we used a metal burnishers to move this draft to a drawing board. Next, we colored in the drawing board, which was the final draft before we created our final version in Illustrator. In Illustrator I used many layers, and mostly the pen tool. The pen tool really allows for very specific and precise drawings. The elements of CRAP were also very oftenly used in my illustration. The one point perspective that we did made for better looking landscape-style shots, and therefore I used it in my establishing shot. I am quite pleased with my work and how it came out, because I don't often use Illustrator. If i were to do this again, I would try to use the gradient tool to create a more 3D effect.