Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Beatrice & The Bunny: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Emily Cook (2017)

This comic page is based off of a portion of my short story Beatrice & The Bunny. Beatrice is a shy girl who gets her bunny stolen from her by a bully, and she runs outside before having the bunny returned to her by a girl named Yvette. It’s a short portion of the saga, and I had to rush many of the moments to fit it into the 8-panel limit – especially the beginning of the resolution – though I think I managed to pull it off. The fact that we were able to add dialogue bubbles helped develop the story a bit faster so I could fit it within the limited amount of space. The story is inspired by my younger self – while I was never bullied as a child, I was painfully shy and preferred keeping to myself. Despite this, I did want friends, but wasn’t good at making or keeping them. In the end, this is a wish-fulfillment story of how I would have liked someone to reach out to me.

The comic was originally sketched out panel-by-panel in a notebook before being sketched onto a large piece of graph paper. We then burnished it onto a piece of posterboard and then drawing it marker using the burnished lines as guides. We then brought it into Illustrator using a scanner and drew it in Illustrator. It was a little difficult to use Illustrator at times, as it can be rather picky, but I was able to make an end result I was proud of. Overall, I did a good job of staying on top of my work and rather enjoyed the whole process, though many of the earlier steps personally felt redundant to me.
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