Game Over: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Rachel Sims (2016)

My comic is about a boy who falls asleep while he is playing video games. While he is asleep he dreams that he has taken place of the main character in the video game. He finds himself standing on a giant boulder that is sticking out of a lava river. Since he knows how to play the video game he knows that in order for him to survive he must jump from one boulder to the next. So he nervously jumps from one boulder to the other and makes it. Once he is on the new boulder he is shocked when he realizes that the boulder is starting to sink into the lava. In the distance there is another big boulder with a small ledge. However it is a much bigger jump than the one before, and there is a good chance he will not make it. The boy decides that jumping is his only chance of living, and jumps off of the boulder hoping to reach the cliff. Right as the boy is in mid-air jumping, the suspense of the dream wakes him up and his sleep,only to find that it is now four A.M.

The process used to create my illustration was challenging yet rewarding. I started off with no confidence thinking there was no way I could do this because I was bad at drawing. I struggled when we did our first initial sketches, but once we got them onto the graph paper and eventually the illustration board, I soon became really proud of my work. One of my favorite parts about this process was when I had finished coloring my illustration board, because I could see the whole comic come together and look like a story. One of the main things that I struggled with was drawing in linear perspective. Once I got my comic into illustrator, I struggled a bit with using the pen tool on curves to create different objects in my comic, however eventually I got the hang of it. I think this project had a lot of learning experiences, and I am very proud of my work.