Silence: A Junior Narrative Illustration by Simone Clements Leedeman (2018)

In my English class, I created a short 750 word story with no dialogue on a young girl named Blair who lives in Chicago and loves listening to music. One day when her headphones suddenly broke, she bought a new pair in a thrift store near her job. What she did not realize was that these headphones held a special ability that allowed anyone wearing them to watch the thoughts of people around them. When she eventually tries to listen to her music, she is suddenly launched into someone's thoughts of breaking into her house to kill her, the only memory remaining of her killer being his striking blue eyes. When she is finally able to take the headphones off to escape the horrible thought, she collapses to the floor, and a man with striking blue eyes reaches out to help her up.

For this project, I created a hybrid creature using three different animals that shared characteristics with my character from my Flash Fiction. The first step in creating this was to sketch my initial draft ideas in my sketchbook, listing characteristics of my character (scared, introverted, shy) and finding animals that shared those characteristics (mouse, cat, deer). After sketching my hybrid, I drafted multiple ideas for poses and linear perspective background scenes from my story. One difficulty I struggled with while sketching the background was understanding what angle the perspective was going to be from. However after a few attempts, I was finally able to find an angle I was satisfied with. Once I finished sketching, I used Adobe Illustrator to draw the final hybrid and place it in the background scene of a city. Though using the program was difficult at first, I am glad that I was able to learn through the experience of using various tools.