Freestyle Academy proudly presents

2706 Miles: A Junior Narrative Illustration by Sarah Haslem (2018)

In English I created a short story about a character’s journey across the United States. The main character, Wesley, begins his journey in Santa Monica. He then bikes 2706 miles to Washington DC to propose to his girlfriend. Along the journey he faces various problems and learns a lot about himself.

For the illustration I created a pig, dog, butterfly, and fox hybrid animal. Each characteristic of Wesley is depicted through each animal. At the beginning of the project I sketched various combinations of animals based on their personalities, then decided on the combination of animals that I liked the most. The dog represents his loyalty, the pig represents his intelligence, the butterfly illustrates his athleticism, and the wolf depicts his strong emotional connections. Although some of the character traits are more visible than others, each animal is illustrated somewhere in the piece. The assignment asked us to create our animal and place it in an environment. When I was almost done with my project, I found a major flaw… Going into the project I really wanted to do something complicated. I wanted to use my skill level to challenge myself and do more then what the assignment asked for. By no means do I regret challenging myself, although it cost me hours of work. I originally used a pa int brush in Adobe Illustrator, rather than the pen tool. The paint brush gave my creature fur and depth. The paintbrush tool also allowed me to create a mystical, detailed, and realistic environment. In my eyes, this was everything that I could have wanted for this project. The problem was that the paintbrush tool creates millions of anchor points, leading to a large file size and a high possibility of crashing my computer. When I was almost done developing my environment, I came to realize that my file would be too big to print, forcing me to start over completely from scratch. With a day left before the due date I created a spin off of the original assignment. Using simpler shapes and no paint brush I created an environment for my creature that I have come to like. Although this environment is not as pleasing to look at as my original, it uses metaphor and detail to relate the creature back to my narrative story.
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