Garbage: A narritive illustration

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For my design project, I drew the heroine of my flash fiction short story as a hybrid of animals. This was a very fun project and I’m extremely proud of it. It took a lot of effort, and I loved drawing it. I had the opportunity to try out weird ideas, like combining a Dutch houseboat with a garbage truck, or drawing a skunk/bat/otter.

My flash fiction story was about a girl named Jane, who is a garbage truck driver. She is very lonely, and she decides to fix that. She sets off in search of something to improve her life. She then finds a can of cat food, and decides to adopt a cat. This makes her feel a lot less lonely.

I started this drawing by sketching out what I wanted her to look like. The first two drawings made her look much younger and a little more like a baby, but in my third sketch, she started to look how she does now. Then, I gathered reference pictures from the internet for the animals and the background. The animals I chose to base Jane off of were an otter, a bat, and a skunk. Otters are very social creatures who thrive with others and need companionship. This fits Jane because she’s very sad when lonely, and needs companionship to feel happy. I chose a bat because Jane notices sounds around her, and bats have great hearing. The last animal is a skunk, because skunks smell bad and are associated with garbage, and Jane is a garbage truck driver. I traced these animals on top of each other, then dressed her in a uniform of a garbage collector, and then boots in bright purple to match the purple on the boat behind her. The boat is a combination of a Dutch houseboat and a garbage truck. I liked the look of the houseboat, so I traced the bottom of it. My scene shows Jane collecting garbage, and walking across garbage cans back to her truck, which is now a truck and boat. For the background, I traced a cliff and then drew a couple of buildings. With these buildings, I used linear perspective, and to look like I drew more buildings, I copied and pasted the original set of buildings and changed the opacity, to look like I drew more buildings.

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