{"id":16,"date":"2025-09-26T17:27:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-26T17:27:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/freestyleacademy.rocks\/~ShaneP\/?page_id=16"},"modified":"2026-05-22T17:45:50","modified_gmt":"2026-05-22T17:45:50","slug":"narrative-1","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/freestyleacademy.rocks\/~ShaneP\/narrative-1\/","title":{"rendered":"Narrative 1"},"content":{"rendered":"\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

In this drawing I decided to only use the rectangle tool in order to create a sort of pixel art vibe to my drawing. I started out by making different shades of gray with the rectangles in order to block out the actually shape and shading of the image before deciding on a color. Eventually I decided blue would be good and finished my colorful blue squid to be added onto the exquisite corpse. The fully finished exquisite corpse ended up being really cool wit the pen-created tiger pairing really well with my pixel art squid. While the room on the right doesn’t fit as well the point of an exquisite corpse drawing is to be surprised so i’m not upset with it at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Flash Fiction Cover<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This cover took the least amount of time from these three illustrator projects and is probably the least significant one as well. This was done to be the cover to my short story on sound cloud and turned out alright. I really like how I used a photograph that is described in the story to be the main focus of the cover but apart from that I don’t have very much to say about this illustration.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Illustrator Choice Project<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This project was definitely my favorite of the three and also carried a lot of significance to me. In this project, we used illustrator to create an illustration that would go onto things like clothes, a tumbler, glass, lanterns, and in my case, a mousepad. As for the actual illustration, I chose to do a frame from the manga “Kagurabachi”. This turned out really good and so I am very satisfied with my work on it. this was done entirely using the pen and pencil tool in illustrator and took a very long time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n

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the manga panel I based the image off of<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n\n\n
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Artist Statement<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Using Illustrator for image creation as opposed to photoshop ended up being incredibly fun. While photoshop feels more like a typical drawing tool or application, illustrator feels like an incredibly specific tool purely for sharp and clean looking designs. I heavily value the incredible variety of use the pen tool has in illustrator. The pen feels like it is truly the center and purpose of illustrator will all the other things just acting as useful bonuses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I chose to create a mousepad for my Illustrator project because the mousepad that I use right now is very boring and lacks any sort of soul. It also is starting to get very old. Because of that, I figured a mousepad would be fun, useful, and simple to make. For the design I chose to recreate a manga panel from kagurabachi but inverting most of the black and white. I wanted to do something from kagurabachi because I had just recently caught up to the manga and I really loved it. But because it is still just a manga, there isn’t all that much merch or things I could get that would show my love of the series so I decided the mousepad art would be a good way of making my own. I also chose to invert black and white first of all because I thought it would look super cool (It does) and because I thought a white mousepad would be too bright and distracting. For my workflow on this project, I started by finding a manga panel I thought would fit well with the mousepad. Once I found that, I began by tracing over the outline of the panel using the pen tool, adjusting the anchors and curves until they lined up good enough. After I had created the outline, I went onto adding the shadows and the details. This took me a while because for much of the shadows, I had to retrace my pen lines that I had previously made in order for them to line up.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Overall, this production meant a lot to me because of how important the series is to me and I wanted to create something that I could take pride in with every look it receives. And my thoughts are that I succeeded. I love how this turned out even just from the illustrator view but in person it looks even cooler. I am super proud with the final product and while having some minor nitpicks in the end, don’t think I could make it any better.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

Puppet\/character creation<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We started off by creating characters that owuld later become puppets. I initially made a character who was a wandering carpenter looking for money. But then lost that puppet. Because I lost the initial puppet I was working on, I had to create a new puppet quickly an just made up a random design, basing the puppet’s actual character off of the finished design. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The Next thing that we did was actually move the puppet and character in the walk cycle composition. This involved us making a walk cycle for our puppets and a walk cycle digitally for the character. We then had to compose the two walk cycles together to make it seem like the character is walking past itself. Creating the puppet walk cycle using stop motion was really difficult as the puppets had to be able to stand up just from the screw in its foot. My puppet was a little heavy and had weak legs which made it fall very often and made me have to adjust the puppet very frequently before shooting the picture that I would use in the final stop motion walk cycle. One thing that would end up proving very annoying was that my puppet moves away slightly in the stop motion, making it look smaller. This would be difficult in the composition because when looping the walk there would be some size changes which looked weird. The digital animation was much simpler and just involved me looking at an example walk cycle and translating that to my character walking. The background was just a simple pier which I thought would fit his identity as a sailor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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