Introduction

In the Narrative Unit, we were encouraged to strengthen our creativity skills. We mastered the use of Pro Tools and Adobe Illustrator using the Wacom Digital Drawing Pad. We began by the exploring the world of fictional writing in our English class and then, in Design, we were challenged to create a creature that displayed all the traits of our main character. The visual narrative unit was very overwhelming compared to past projects because of how fast it was paced but overall it was a very rewarding unit. We worked a lot in Adobe Illustrator throughout both the Design and Digital Media classes and I was given the opportunity to continue to develop my skills as a graphic designer. 

Short Story

We took our first steps into the Narrative Unit in our English class. We were assigned to write a five to seven page story about anything we desired. The story was required to take place in a short period of time, so that shortened my list of ideas. But before we were even able to start the writing process, we had to come up with a main character and write up an entire backstory about them. I was flooded with different ideas so I wrote four different backstories about one character. Then we started the real writing process, and I wrote almost six drafts before picking one. I was inspired by various televisions shows I had watched in the past and I ended up writing about an insane asylum that gets taken over and a particular patient that outs the official’s plans to mistreat the patients.

The Ravenswood Psychiatric Hospital: the nicer way of saying “the insane asylum on the corner of Sixth and Eighth.” It was built in 1934, about forty years ago. There was a tall administration building enclosed by four wings, two west wings and two east wings. It was surrounded by a ten-foot tall electric fence so that no one could get near the asylum even if they wanted to. No one ever saw the inside other than the patients and the nurses. 

One patient, by the name of Maci Gibbs, was considered the most stable amongst them all. For a while she had felt as though there was a voice in her head that was trying to convince her to do things she didn’t want to do. She was strong enough to fight those thoughts at the time, and rather than telling her hypercritical family, she eventually checked herself into Ravenswood. By 1974, Maci had been a patient for three years. Many patients with more extreme cases had been there much longer than Maci. Although, since she was the nurses’ favorite, she had bonded with those who managed her treatment plan. 

About a year and a half later, a section of the federal government, Maci believed it was Executive Branch, was given control of the hospital. No one was aware of this at the time, but the previous owner told everyone that a new team of managers would be taking over. He promised that all daily routines would continue as they did and no patient’s treatment plan would be altered – and, as far as he knew, he was telling the truth. 

That night after supper, Maci was walking around and she saw all members of the faculty bursting out of a room with nothing but anger on their faces. Maci did not fully understand why the nurses had such a hard time accepting this announcement but she figured it was a matter of their paycheck. By the next morning there were ten new members introduced to the facility. Already, three of the nurses involved in her treatment plan had been laid off, a couple of Maci’s friends were nowhere to be found, and she had been scheduled for a one-on-one with a new doctor. 

She witnessed Gray Hobbes, a close friend of hers, coming out of the room where they perform electro-shock therapy. He looked as if his soul had escaped him and all that was left was his shivering body and dilated pupils. Maci attempted to hide behind a wall after seeing him exit the room but he knew her techniques. He was physically agitated; you could see the anger flaming through his eyes. He threatened to run, and eventually, that’s exactly what he did. As soon as the clock struck noon, he made his escape. The alarms blared and first responders were notified. In less than 30 minutes, there was a news story that was headlined “Psychiatric Patient on the Loose; Dangerous to the People.” For around two hours, people were on the lookout, but soon enough another headline came out saying he had been located, shot on sight, and was no longer a threat to the community. 

Maci mourned. She drowned in the grief of losing her friend. She knew in her heart that she couldn’t have stopped him, but she knew that she could’ve tried. Although, no one at the hospital seemed to care; it was just another incident to forget about in years to come. She couldn’t express how she felt, so she made her way to her scheduled one-on-one. 

The aura of the room was similar to one of an interrogation room. The way the doctor presented himself caught Maci off guard. He didn’t have the same manner as both doctors she had previously met with. He introduced himself as Gary. No “Dr.” before his name. Just Gary. He began to ask her questions about how she felt about her mental health, and her thoughts on the way the facility had run in the years she was here. Maci was expecting to simply be given yet another report on what the doctors had observed, not how she felt about herself and Ravenswood. But cooperatively, she expressed how she felt as though she was getting better. “I believe my mental health has been stabilizing, I feel better.” she said baldly. Maci didn’t normally engage in deep conversation with anyone. The only people she ever talked to were her nurses. There was a moment of awkward silence; then Gary started writing notes on a small piece of paper and handed it to Maci. 

“Give this to the nurse who normally checks on you.” Gary looked down at his papers. “Jacob. Give this to Jacob.” 

Maci had no reason not to listen to him so she walked down the hall towards Jacob’s office. It wasn’t really an office, nor was it Jacob’s, but it was an unoccupied room so he liked to call it that. Maci opened the door and went inside. Jacob wasn’t in there and Maci wasn’t sure where he was or when he’d be back, so she decided to give the note back to Gary. As she turned around to open the door, her eye caught the title of a book she had recognized. After being there for so long, Maci had read every book from every bookshelf of almost every room. The title read, “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders” and underneath it “DSM-4.” The DSM-4 was the current standard criteria to assess a person with a mental illness. Maci never prompted herself to read this book but for some reason all the copies had been hidden in different places since the new management took over. Something pulled her towards this book; she knew she shouldn’t be reading it, especially in an unsupervised room. She opened the cover and the air around her had been saturated by the smell of a fresh marker. Written inside, “Not up to date. Do not reference.” “But this book was published twenty years ago, how much research could they have really done to discontinue the reference of this book,” Maci thought to herself. Being as curious as she is, Maci held onto the book and ran back to her room. Hours passed as Maci sat on her bed and analyzed every inch of the DSM-4. She read about different disorders people had, and she was able to correlate the symptoms of those disorders with people she knew at the facility. 

The day she walked into the hospital, she had been classified as schizophrenic, but after reading this book she started to think that’s not what she should have been treated as. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the note Gary gave her. It wrote, “Cut Chlorpromazine. Replace with α-Pyrrolidinopentiophenone.” These words had no meaning to Maci, they were just a bunch of fancy words doctor used to talk about patients, but she had a fancy word dictionary right in front of her. 

Immediately, she started flipping through every page, first to define Chlorpromazine, then to attempt to find α-Pyrrolidinopentiophenone. After hours of searching and going through hundreds of words that she could barely sound out, Maci became infuriated. Gary had written a note to replace her medicine with a psychotic drug used to give patients a mental and physical body high and strip them of their mental stability. She ripped the note out of her pocket and ran out of her room, leaving the book open on her bed. She ran, first, to Jacob’s office. 

She burst through the door regretfully, because she knew she was going to get in trouble for engaging in such a reaction. She was startled by Jacob’s presence, and he was startled by hers as well. She threw the note in his direction, subconsciously hoping he was going to match her energy. But, that wasn’t the case. Instead, he picked up the note, read it for what felt like a couple of minutes, and put it down slowly. He didn’t say anything.

 “Why are they doing this? I thought I was doing fine. You said I was doing fine,” Maxi exclaimed. 

Jacob got up from his chair and looked Maci in her eyes. “Gary told me about this,” He said. “He already explained to me why this is happening, and I think his plan will be very effective in your case.” He seemed so genuine but there was fear in his eyes. Maci could feel something wrong but there was nothing she could physically put her finger on. Her throat was getting choked up, her eyes started to water , and her heart started pulsating, so she ran out of the room. She refused to go back to her room but she didn’t have another place to be alone. All patients required to be supervised when using the bathroom but Maci didn’t have the patience. She ran down the hall trying to make the least amount of noise as possible when she heard a radio com behind her. She didn’t have the time or energy to look behind her because she knew what would happen if she did. There were men behind her yelling “Stop,” and she could feel the footsteps getting closer and closer to her. For a split second, Maci closed her eyes and hit the floor. She tried to get back up but the men, who had guns in their thick black vest, managed to grab her and push her back down. 

After what had felt like a lifelong nap, Maci woke up in a dark, musty room that she had never been in before. There was a single lamp and she watched the light flicker for minutes before a tall man entered the room. She recognized his body type but she failed to see his face in the dark. He flipped a light switch but nothing happened. He walked closer and began to speak.

“You are a smart girl,” he said. He came into the light. It was Gary. No surprise for Maci. She looked confused, she wasn’t sure what he was talking about. Did he mean that he and all the other new people at the facility were trying to drive them insane once again or that they were experimenting different medications on lives that they thought didn’t matter as much. Finally, she replied, “What was the point of doing all of this? Did you think that we were all so mentally unstable that we wouldn’t be able realize you we’re screwing with our health?” 

“To be honest, Maci, I did think that. But it isn’t as if I failed to plan for such an event.” 

“What’re you going to do? Are you going to kill me?”

“Maybe. Maybe not. It all depends on if you’re willing to cooperate with what I’m going to tell you to do.” 

“I will never do anything as long as I can fight for my right to live. No one is checked into a hospital like this if they, or someone, wants them to get better.”

“Well then you are going to have to face the consequences.” 

Her human rights were the only thing that mattered to her in that very moment. Whatever happened, happened because she wasn’t going to give in to the madness. She knew she couldn’t bare to watch everyone end up like Gray. 

A sharp pain ran through her body. It was as though she got shot in the arm. She turned her head in utter pain and saw a needle punctured into the side of her left arm. Everything went black. She woke up again strapped to a long table. She was in the electro-shock therapy room. There were 4 men in the room and they were adjusting the machines. “3…2….1.” You could hear Maci’s scream from miles away. This definitely wasn’t “therapy” anymore, and Maci knew that this was it for her. Shaking, she said, “You can hurt me, you can shock me, you can do whatever you want. But you need to know that you and your plans will never be foolproof. After me, there will be someone else.” No one responded and all she heard again was, “3..2..1.”

Illustrations

My Illustrator project for Digital Media takes after all of my other projects from the Narrative Unit. For this assignment, I created stickers that depict different aspects of the short story I wrote in our English class. My story is about a young, intelligent girl, Maci Gibbs, that is a patient at the Ravenswood Psychiatric Hospital who is faced with all kinds of endeavours when the facility is taken over by a branch of the government. Towards the end of the story, she finds the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders which creates a chain of events that result in Maci’s death. Using this, I created a cartoon version of the DSM-4 as one of my stickers. Another one of my stickers is a horizontal empty pill bottle with the cap off to indicate some sort of mess made by medicine. Finally, my last sticker is the name tag of a doctor that reads “Gary.” Gary is the name of the new doctor in the facility who seems sketchy from the start and ends up controlling Maci’s doom. On the sticker, it reads “Professional” under his name to create the irony of how unprofessional he is in the story. 

This project was an interesting one because since I had decided to correlate my stickers to my short story, I had to find important aspects that were worth illustrating. Being a design student, I get a lot of practice in Adobe Illustrator and it has become one of my favorite programs to use so this project was somewhat like a breeze. I enjoyed being able to help my friends in our Digital Media class that don’t have as much experience with this program and find new tools that I can learn to use in my future at Freestyle.

Design

The Narrative Unit in Design was definitely a project that took me by surprise. Looking at past classes and their creature designs were so odd that I was immediately intrigued. We didn’t have much practice with Adobe Illustrator when we first started the project, but by the end of it I couldn’t imagine what it was like to not know my way around the program. We started off my drawing sketches of our creature in our sketchbooks and then we created a morgue. The morgue included five pictures of each of the five creatures from different angles in different positions. We were also told to compile a morgue of twenty photos that we could use as potential inspiration for our backgrounds, although we didn’t pay much attention to it at first. Using the morgue, we started to slowly build ideas and then with a partner, we used our DSLR to photograph different positions for our character. Our main goal was to convey movement, whether it was flying or walking, we wanted to make our creature look like it was in action. With the use of the pen tool, we were able to craft our entire creature in no time. By the time we were done with the construction of our creature, it was time for the construction of our background. I hadn’t looked at the background morgue in almost a month and by then, I had been newly inspired by the pictures I had picked. I found a photo that clearly depicted the message I was trying to convey in my story without giving the impression of a rusty insane asylum. After two months of working on this project it was finally done. After turning in our backgrounds, many of us went back and edited our creature because after having so much practice in Illustrator, we wanted to use all the tools we had to make sure our creatures looked the absolute best. I’m grateful for the number of skills we learned in Illustrator in Design because it really helped when we started our narrative projects in Digital Media.

Artist Statement

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.