Introduction
Story
Tree
She is completely startled when a hand comes down on her shoulder. Her heart stops for a moment.
“Oh, my God! Are you okay?” Marnie pants, beads of sweat running down her face.
“Did you see that?” Alana whispers, the color gone from her face.
“Can you walk?” Marnie says, while offering a hand.
“Did you see that?” a little louder this time.
“See what?”
“The walking tree.”
“The what? How hard did you hit your head?”
“Over there,” Alana says, while pointing towards a grove trees.
“Let’s try to get you back to the car.”
The trip was a blur of pain for Alana as she hobbled back to the car, using Marnie a crutch. The drive home wasn’t much better.
“I know I saw something.”
“Ya, a bunch of trees. I saw you fall down that hillside.”
“No, really, I saw something moving out there!”
“Maybe you spooked a deer?”
“But it was bigger than that!”
“Probably was that elusive 10 point buck that every hunter wants to find.”
___
Back in her bedroom, Alana notices that her camera didn’t fare well during her fall down the hill. There is a hairline crack in the camera’s screen and it is difficult to pull the SD card out of its slot. She slips the SD card into her computer, crosses her figures, and loads the video. Her breath catches as she stares at the blowed out video playing back in front of her.
“This is useless,” she sighs.
Illustrations
Design Process
My creature, representing Alana, consists of the body and head of a crow, the legs of a cat, the tail of a goldfish, and the wings of a bee. I chose these animals to represent some of my characters more prominent traits. She is observant, hyper with her movements, easily distracted by things, and generally anxious; each animal corresponds respectively with these traits.
Crows have a keen eye when it comes to finding small items that catch their attention. Cats are commonly seen as independent, lazy pets, however, young cats can be very hyper and require a lot of attention. If someone is told they have the attention span of a goldfish, it means they are often distracted or have a poor memory. Bumble bees are diligent workers but seem anxious if something they were not expecting gets in the way of them doing their job.
After writing down five personality traits that my main character had, I came up with different animals that fit each trait. Next, I pictured a scene from my story that my creature would best fit in and sketched out a few ideas to show perspective and layout. I searched for and downloaded pictures of the objects that I knew I wanted in my scene, such as a chair, a window, and the specific forest where my story took place.
I then put my chosen images into Adobe Photoshop, and used a masking tool to isolate out the parts of the photo that I wanted to keep. I rearranged the position of the objects to form the rough outline of my background, and used Adobe Illustrator to transform my photo collage into an illustration. I used a Pantone color book to find a color scheme to depict the mood of the scene. Finally, I repeated this process for my creature and combined it with the background to complete the illustration.