Introduction
During the Visual Narrative Project, we practiced communicating character and story arc through descriptive storytelling, narrative digital art, storyboards, films, and animations. We deepen our technical communication skills from learning a variety of modern professional equipment and applications such as Wacom Digital Drawing Pads, lighting equipment, downshooters, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Animate, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Avid Pro Tools, Propellerhead Reason, HTML/CSS, DragonFrame, and Google Apps.
What I valued from the Visual Narrative Project in all my classes is that in English I was able to create a short story that is interesting for others to read. In Digital Media I was able to create and audio track version of my story that makes it sound even more interesting. Then in Design I was able to take the main character of my story and turn it into a creature with body parts from different animals that represent the main characters traits.
Story
In English we were assigned to create our own short story. The first thing we did was brainstorm ideas for what we wanted our story to be about and the first thing that came to my mind was a half cat half human little girl. I think my inspiration for my story was myself because the main character that I created is shy like me and she finds it hard to speak up sometimes in class just like me.
My short story: Coming Out of The Wild
Illustrations
In Digital Media we’ve made a few things in Adobe Illustrator like album art for our Short Stories, we made Exquisite Corpse Illustrations with groups that we were assigned to, and we also made our own artwork that we put on things that we use or wear like tumblrs, stickers, sweaters, T-shirts, night lights, mousepads, and etc.
For the Exquisite Corpse project, we were put in groups and we had to draw something on the artboard that we were assigned to but we weren’t supposed to know what the other people in our group were going to draw until Mr. Flo puts them all together. While I was doing the project at home I started drawing the front half of a cat but then I changed my mind and thought of drawing a sleeping Pikachu instead. To draw the Pikachu I searched up and image from the internet that showed him sleeping. Then I copied it and pasted it into Illustrator then traced it from there. Once I finished tracing it and filling it with color I came up with the idea to add a pillow under Pikachu’s head.
For the Illustrator Choice project, we had to choose an object that we wanted to design. There were many things that we could make like earrings, stickers, patches, tumbler designs, mousepad designs, glass designs etc. For my Illustrator Choice project I was thinking a lot about what I wanted to do and at first I was thinking about doing stickers because I love collecting them or doing the nightstand/light because I thought it would be good to display it somewhere in my house. In the the end I chose to do a mousepad because I thought that it would be more useful and it would take up lots of space in my room. The first thing I did was draw a rough sketch of my design on a piece of paper. Then in Adobe Illustrator I started tracing over an image of Kuromi and My Melody from the internet. To make the background I drew the flower first using the pen tool then filling it with coloring using the live paint tool. After I finished that I copied the skull on Kuromi’s head and changed the color to be purple. I drew a heart, about the same size as the skull, using the pen tool and colored it with a darker pink. I arranged them to try matching it to my sketch copying them again and again to get a pattern. To change the background color from white to pink I just used the rectangle tool to cover the whole artboard. then colored the rectangle with an even lighter pink. Once I finished I was looking at it for a few minutes thinking about adding something to the petals so I took the same dark pink from the hearts and I added some kind of shadow to some of the petals.
Artist Statement
For my illustrator project, I chose to make a mouse pad featuring two characters from Sanrio. The names of those characters are Kuromi and My Melody. I have lots of Sanrio themed stuff like phushies, stickers, a wallet, nail stickers, notebooks, pencils, pens, enamel pins, magnets etc. Now since I made this mouse pad it would be a new item added to my Sanrio collection. I chose to design a mouse pad because I thought that it would be useful for me to use at home or maybe when I go to college since most of the time I’m always on my computer doing school work. When I was figuring out how to do the background of the mouse pad I had a hard time thinking of how I wanted to arrange the skulls and the hearts. At first I was thinking of drawing the skull and heart, arranging it in a certain way, then making it into a pattern but that didn’t turn out well so in the end I just arranged the skulls in one column and the hearts in another column then kept copying them and pasting them until it sort of looked like my rough sketch. What I’m most proud of with this project is the flower that I put behind Kuromi and My Melody because I was able to draw it perfectly without having to trace over an image of a flower from the internet.
Overall I think that using Adobe Illustrator is funner and easier to use than Adobe Photoshop because in Adobe Illustrator I was able to design my own mousepad in Digital Media and I was able to illustrate my short story character in a specific scene. Since the beginning of the the year up until now I learned how to do many things in Illustrator like how to make fur, feathers, how to use the bland tool , and how to use the live paint bucket tool. In Photoshop I learned how to edit photos to make them look darker or brighter, how to blend two photos together, and how to put a photo in a certain shape.
Music
For the Experimental Music project in Digital Media, we learned how to make our own music with virtual instruments in Pro Tools. For this project we had to try and create our own music with the resources that we have in Pro Tools as well as the phsysical piano keyboard that was under our computers or we could use a piano keyboard plugin on our computers.
To make my Experimental Music in Pro Tools I used the piano keyboard plugin on the computer. I started by setting up all of the instrument plugins. Then I played around with all of the different sounds while also trying to figure out how I wanted to start it.
Artist Statement
My inspiration for my music are pop songs because I usually listen to them most of the time so I wanted to try making pop music. I am most proud of the album art that I created for my song because I like the way that I put a gradient in the background and how I used the brush tool to make some highlights on the CD. What I valued about learning how to use Virtual Instruments for music production was that I was able to put them together and make different sounds with them to help create my own song without using real instruments.
Using MIDI and Pro Tools was a challenge for me because I was struggling to try and find the right sounds that worked well together and made it sound good. It was also challenging for me to figure out where I should add the different music instruments.
Design
In Design we’ve done almost all of our projects in Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop. For the Narrative Unit we did two different projects . The first project was made in Illustrator and we had to make an illustration of a specific scene from the short stories that we created in our English classes. The second project was done in Photoshop and we were challenged to take a photo of the same scene we chose do for the Illustration but illustrating it in real life instead of drawing it.
For the Narrative Creature project, the first thing we did was turn the characters that we came up with in our short stories into an unusual creature that has five different body parts each from a different mammal/insect. Once we finished our creatures we moved on to the background part of the scene using linear perspective. After we finished everything we had to put our creature and the background on the same artboard.
Artist Statement
My story is about an eight year old girl, who is half cat and half human. Her name is Ella and my scene is portraying her in the math classroom. In class their teacher assigns them a math worksheet. While they are working on it she sees one of her classmates at her table having a hard time doing the worksheet and she is very smart so she wants to try to help them. The conflict she is facing that is keeping her from helping her classmate is that she is very shy and scared that they could say something bad about her. To create my creature I wrote down five different traits that my character has on a google doc. For each of those traits I had to search up different mammals, insects, birds, ocean creatures, and reptiles that match each trait and figure out which body part I would use from those animals to create my creature. Then I had to make a color scheme for my creature using the same google doc that has my characters’ traits on it. To make my creature I started outlining the different body parts from the animals I chose on separate layers in Adobe Illustrator. Once I was done I filled them in with color while also adding effects to make it kinda look like the real body part. The body parts I chose to use for my creature are a rabbit’s head, butterfly wings, lovebird legs, penguins torso, and a gecko’s tail. I chose these body parts because the rabbit head represents my character’s gentleness, the butterfly wings represents my character’s nice trait, the lovebird legs represent her playful side, the penguin torso represents her smart side, and the gecko tail represents her shy side. My creature is in a math classroom and I chose to make it in one point linear perspective. While making the background I had a hard time figuring out where I would put certain objects like the table or the bookshelf and how to make the lights on the ceiling. I am pleased with my work because I really like the detail in the table and the door. Something I would change is maybe adding texture to the floor to make it look like it’s a carpet.
To me this project was probably the funnest project that we’ve done this year for me because I really enjoyed the process of creating my creature and the making the background scene for the creature. It was also fun for me to learn how to make the fur texture in Illustrator which is what I used for the rabbit head on my creature as well as learning how to make different kinds of feathers in Illustrator.
For the Narrative Character Portrait project, we had to use our cameras to capture the same scene we drew in Illustrator using lights and our cameras. We had to find someone to be our subject and act like our characters in the photo. To take the photo I used the studio at freestyle and I set up the lights with a little help from my subject. I made one of the lights blue and the other one white. While we were taking the photos I was telling the subject how I wanted them to pose and what expression she should have on her face.
The Narrative Character Portrait was not a fun project for me because I had a hard time finding a person that was the same age as my character and I also wasn’t sure how I take a photo of them in a school classroom. If I were to do this project again I probably would have chosen to the scene outside the front lawn of my house. I would also try to step up and ask one of my neighbors if I their kid could be my subject.