Game of Brothers: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Cullen Blanchfield (2016)

My story is about two brothers who play each other in a football game from different schools. Derek, the quarterback of his team is sacked by Boomer, his brother. Boomer breaks Derek's arm and feels terrible. Their father sends them to the same school to play football together so they can't hurt each other ever again. At their new school together they won the state championship in Texas.

I initially started with sketching my comic with a pencil, and it eventually transformed into a full comic. We created an illustration board with the use of burnishers and carving our drawings onto the illustration board. We took a picture of our illustration board and import it to trace it to get an accurate representation of our illustration. I used dozens of layers to convert my drawn illustration to a graphically designed comic. The use of the pen tool was crucial in this process. Illustrator is an amazing program that I really enjoyed getting used to in this project. An issue I encountered was creating things on the wrong layers so they were out of order. This was a major issue because I would have to stop my work and then delete it and find the correct layer to put it on. In a situation when I would be working for a half an hour on a panel and I find out some of the things are on the wrong layer. This was definitely a time consuming setback. This was my first project in Illustrator regarding a comic. I really love photoshop and creating conceptually complex pieces, so the simplistic nature of this project was actually difficult for me. I wish I could've incorporated more of my passion for abstract art into my comic, but I truly did enjoy creating this and I am proud of it.