Roots: A Junior Narrative Illustration by Melissa Pinkner (2018)

My flash fiction story is about a girl so caught up in the responsibilities of school and extracurricular activities that she doesn’t take the time to look around and enjoy life. The turning point in the story occurs when she becomes so stressed and tired that she crashes her car and stumbles into the woods, falling into a tranceful delusion of her turning into the trees and nature around her.

Overall, the process was very difficult for me, though I feel the hard work paid off. Initially, I started sketching the dress, which turned out to be a lot more ornate than I thought, taking much longer to accomplish than I planned. This was a common theme, as the same situation took place in my first attempt at making a background, which was going to be stormy waves. The details proved to be a lot harder to trace than I envisioned. However, I felt that showing nature as an angry force would not fit well with my narrative, so I ended up making a second background of a sunset over the ocean. In a sudden stroke of luck, I realized combining the two backgrounds would allow me to display both backgrounds so my hard work on each wouldn’t go to waste. Thus, the background shows not only the beauty of nature with the sunset, but the sheer power of it as well with the monstrous waves. My character’s personality traits are represented by a wolf, a mountain goat, a butterfly, and a snake. By using the face of a wolf, I attempted to show her independent tendencies, and the horns of a mountain goat to portray her true adventurous spirit. The snake tongue shows that she is adaptive like a snake, however the butterfly wings represent that she is more delicate than people believe. Though I wish I had added more perspective with the sun and the waves, I am very pleased with my work as it took me many long hours to complete.