INTRODUCTION
The Narrative unit started with a written short story that we created in English class. Then, in Design, we created our own creature consisting of five different animals that exhibited key characteristics of our main characters from our English short story. We also composed a photograph that showed a scene from the story brought to life, using subjects, props, and colored lighting. The project was overall very focused on “showing, not telling”, both in writing and designing.
From this project, I really valued the creative freedom we were given when writing our short story, because we were able to do anything we wanted with the assignment. That kind of freedom gave me the courage to do what I really wanted with the story, and that carried my design projects as well. Creating our creature gave me a really good understanding of how to use Adobe Illustrator which I really value.
STORY
The end product for English was a short story. To prepare to write it, we read many examples of short stories, each about a different topic and written in a different style. Two of these were “The Personal Touch” by Chet Williamson, and “Stockings” by Tim O’Brien. Reading these gave us a better sense of the style in which we wanted to write our own story and how long we wanted it to be. We also used a character brainstorming exercise and plot mapping exercise to better understand our initial ideas, both of which are pictured below.
My final short story followed 7-year-old Isla, who has a very close relationship with her mother and wants to make a birthday present for her at school. However, a classmate starts taking the materials that Isla is using and finally she confronts her classmate, Frances. It turns out that Frances is actually making a birthday gift for her own mother as well, and the two girls are able to bond over their respective love for their mothers. Although Isla had been angry before, she realizes that Frances and she have a lot in common and they become close friends. Attached below it the audio production of my short story, which I recorded and edited using Pro Tools.
ILLUSTRATOR PROJECT
This project really allowed me to be creative, which was both a blessing and a curse. It was a lot of fun to be able to play around with so many different ideas, and Illustrator is one of my favorite Adobe apps, so this project as a whole was so exciting for me. However, with so much freedom came a lot of indecision about what design to choose and what type of media to create. In the end, I chose to draw a duck with boots and a hat, which reminded me of a book I used to read when I was really young.
I began my process by sketching out my design on paper. I then uploaded that image to Illustrator and traced it using the pen tool. Originally I wanted to print my design onto a sweatshirt, but I realized that the light color of my design would not print very well onto a gray material, so I decided to make it into a patch. This required me to simplify my design, but making the hat one solid color instead of a pattern, and changing the tail feathers to be more defined. Overall, I am really happy with how the design turned out!