This illustration is based on the short story I wrote called “The Mind Fight”. It takes place in 1974 in a psychiatric hospital, or otherwise known as an insane asylum. It tells the story of Maci Gibbs, a girl who was considered the most “stable” amongst all the other facility’s patients, but when the facility was taken over by a branch of the government, her stability became a threat. She stole the DSM-4 from a nurse’s office and found that she was being wrongly prescribed by her new doctors. The scene I illustrated takes place in a simple, empty room within the hospital with a lot of light to depict the calm before the storm, or before everything went downhill for Maci.
The creature is a combination of animals that exhibit all of Maci’s characteristics. The body is made up of a wasp that fades into the tail of a dolphin. The wasp displays her confidence and ability to fight back. The dolphin tail exhibits Maci’s fun loving, intelligent personality, but also her unpredictable behavior. Her arms and hands are those of geckos to display how docile she can be. On the back of the creature are crow wings to demonstrate her very curious and almost aggressive nature. Finally, the head of the creature is that of a quokka to express her very amiable personality.
After we finished writing this story for our English class, we were given the assignment to compile all of the characteristics of our main character and assign each one to a different animal. We created a morgue of all the possible positions of body parts we could use to put our creature together and then we collected various photos that we could use to inspire the background of our illustration. The pen tool may have been the most important part of my entire project. I used it in order to outline the creature and make it one large body that exhibited two different animals and it came in extremely handy when outlining the background. Overall, I am really pleased with the way my work turned out and I truly appreciate how much better I have gotten at using Adobe Illustrator because of this project.
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