Bottled Up: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Peter Zdepski (2017)

Throughout this experience of creating my first Comic I learned much more about the process of making original stories and displaying them in the form of multiple panels and also taught me new and useful techniques that I will use frequently in the future. Using the pen tool in Adobe Illustrator to trace over the pre-drawn panels made me understand more about how the pen tool could be used to make my future art look cleaner, as now I see it as a good tool to trace over work to make it look smoother instead of just drawing it off the bat with the pen tool which is what I thought everyone else did and could not do myself. One thing I feel like I was lacking though was the complexity of my Comics story. I don’t have any real specific and grave problem with it, rather I feel like it was a bit on the simple side. This simpleness however was intentional due to the fact I wanted to make something relatively easy to animate, but I feel this caused some drawbacks while expressing this story through a comic. I do though believe that I had an effective metaphor within my Comic, which is that those at the top (the tree) may not know the hardships of those under them (the flowers) and that sharing what you may take for granted with the less fortunate (water) can actually better both parties. I will be able to use the skills I learned in this project like layering and correct use of the pen tool throughout many of the Adobe apps I will use in freestyle and more specifically these skills will carry over heavily to my work in Digital Media. It is also important to mention that this project has increased my respect for people who draw and come up with original stories as making difficult creative decisions took more time and consideration than I had initially thought.