I chose to write my narrative about a character I invented named Eziekiel. Eziekiel is a skater growing up in Richmond, California, and despite his less than ideal surroundings he still manages to have fun and ignore all the negativity by skating and listening to music. E-Z typically wakes up this early so he can get a skate session in, but as he leaves his house and warms up at his favorite spot, his skateboard deck snaps, rendering it useless. After finding an abandoned bike next to a dumpster, E-Z decides to bike to the nearest skate shop rather than his school to get a new skate deck. I chose to model the part of the story in which E-Z is making his way through the street from Berkeley to Richmond to somewhat represent my character in his natural environment: the North Bay Area. As E-Z is in the inner city, there is plenty of street art to be found among the buildings of the street he is walking in (in the illustration) as well as dumpsters, trash and other discarded pieces of humanity. The street itself is more of an alley which is why there are no cars and the color of the buildings is not very lively.
To create our illustrations for our characters specifically, we were tasked with choosing body parts from different animals based upon qualities our characters had to represent them. For Eziekiel, I chose a lynx head to represent integrity, antenna to represent astuteness, a cobra tongue to represent perseverance, and seal torso to convey his positive nature. The wings on my character are from an eagle which represent how important the concept of freedom is to E-Z In our creative process, we first created each of the individual parts of our narrative character’s body in Adobe Illustrator utilizing images of each body parts and resizing them to fit the proportions of the character correctly whilst assembling. For the background, I chose to utilize an eye-level horizon line with buildings lining the street up nearly until the vanishing point so as to create a chaotic, cramped, urban scene.
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