My story One Last “I Love You” showcases a Guatemalan mother’s journey into the United States along with her two children. In this heartbreaking tale, the unnamed main character, who is running away from her hometown to escape drug warfare and an abusive husband, displays all the difficulties-both mentally and physically, that attempting to cross into the United States holds for immigrants. In this particular scene, the mother has reached the border wall in Tijuana where she is found by border patrol, and faces the difficult decision of leaving her children to cross the border alone, or fleeing back together. Ultimately, she makes the choice to leave her children, knowing they will have a better life in the United States than she could ever give them.
To create this project, I worked with Adobe Illustrator, utilizing features such as grain, texturizers, free-hand painting, gradients, and primarily the pen tool. Through a complex layer structure, I was able to create this creature with attention to detail. My creature is composed of six different animals, each representing a vital trait to the main character of my story. It’s mouth is a duck bill to showcase her motherly instinct, its body is a shark’s to demonstrate her fierceness and resilient attitude (made with gradient and highlight tools), it has a lion mane to represent her fortitude and bravery, a lizard tail to represent her ability to think on her feet, and the face of an owl to show her intense focus and determination on what she deems important. Finally, I added bee wings, utilizing pattern and low opacity, which constitute the character’s ability to withstand hard work. All of these features combined create a fierce and accurate representation of my story’s character. With regards to the background, I made a long border wall tainted with graffiti and political illustrations (to make my work accurate, I researched current political art). The background was the most difficult part to create because the shape of the wall made it difficult to execute one point perspective, and to create the texture of the ground proved to be a challenge. Overall, I am happy with my project, it is detailed and well executed.
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