The Zenith project is the culmination of our time at Freestyle, combining all the skills we have learned into something new that shows off our personal creativity and style.

For my Zenith, I chose to do illustration. I have always been a big reader, and I learned how to read with illustrated children’s books, so I thought it would be really cool to make one of my own. This project was especially important to me because it was inspired by memories of my mom and I taking walks around the neighborhood when I was little, and looking at all the ginkgo leaves. That is the main inspiration and I hope the book makes the reader feel more connected to their own childhood memories. Another inspiration was the “The Anthropocene reviewed” by John Green, a collection of essays about many different topics. One chapter was about ginkgo trees, and I learned while reading it that ginkgos lose all their leaves in 24 hours instead of gradually throughout Autumn. I thought it would be really cool to be there when a ginkgo tree lost its leaves, like a blizzard of leaves.

I began my process by creating my moodboard. This included the color scheme I wanted, as well as other children’s books I had read growing up and those I liked the illustration style of.

I then moved on to deciding how many pages I wanted and what each illustration would look like. Below are my first round of sketches for each page:

Finally, I added color and detail! Here are my final pages:

Overall, Zenith was an immense learning opportunity and I am so happy with both my project outcome and process. I learned so much about drawing, InDesign, printing and more, and feel much more confident in my abilities to learn about new technologies by myself. Below is my final Zenith reflection.