Make Your Move: A Junior Narrative Illustration by Nicole Nguyen (2018)

What happens when a wanted criminal is caught by palace guards? Of course, they’d be taken to the dungeon. Irene Alana is a notorious magician in her kingdom who is desperate to escape from prison. She resorts to using her own blood in her spell to break free.

Irene’s personality isn't really clear in the story, so rather than basing the animals off her characteristics, I based the animals off her actions instead. I thought monkeys, hawks, and lions were my best options. We weren’t allowed to base our animals off humans, so I felt like I was cheating when I decided to use a monkey’s body as the base of my animal. To give Irene the “vicious” effect I needed, I gave her an lion head. In place of the lion’s eyes, I used hawk eyes and added wings. I started by searching up photos of my animals that were in the position I wanted and uploading those photos to Adobe Illustrator. I used the pen tool to trace over the photos and combined them together to get my hybrid animal. Trying to fill in the traced animal using the pen tool was a challenge because sometimes it wouldn’t fill in the parts I wanted. In the end, it all worked out. After finishing my animal, I created a background. The story takes place inside a dungeon, so creating a background was very easy. However, using linear perspective on Illustrator was much more difficult than drawing on paper. I found it difficult to lead all the lines to a vanishing point. When I combined the animal and the background, it looked a little too plain, so I had to add some details such as cracks in the walls, chains, shadows, and lanterns. Considering all the struggles I went through, I’d say I’m pretty happy with how my hybrid animal turned out.