Childhood: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Siyuan Che (2016)

This story follows a high school aged boy who is trying to experience something he has never experienced before: childhood. Ever since he was a little boy, his parents has intensely home schooled him and forced him to take multiple time consuming extracurricular classes. Consequently, he missed out on many childhood experiences. On a turn of event, both of his parents passed away in a tragic car accident when he was 15. He dearly wanted to experience for once how it felt to play with toys, so he decides to sneak in a Preschool facility.

There were many steps in the process of creating this illustration. It started off with sketches of the layout on plain paper, then the sketches were drawn with more details on graph paper. Once the sketches were done, I placed the graph paper on an illustration board and used a burnisher to trace over the sketches. I then used sharpie to trace over the pencil marks and used markers and colored sharpies to do the initial coloring. For me, this was the hardest part of this process because the marks were faint. I overcame this issue by shining a light on the illustration board so the shadows of the dents would be more apparent. Then, the final illustration board is scanned into Adobe Illustrator using Genius Scan. In Illustrator, I used the pen tool to trace over the drawings on the illustration board and added more precise coloring on the piece. A difficulty I encountered with Illustrator was trying to trace the small, detailed curves. I overcame these obstacles by staying optimistic with my project and I traced with huge patience. As my first production of Illustrator, I feel that my work is acceptable to myself. However, if I get a chance to redo this project, I would put more work in coloring and the details in each panel.