Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Catch Up: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Vanessa Gonzales (2016)

Each and every day, William Brawlford eats ketchup and fries, without fault. Until one day, his ketchup bottle falls and smashes. He heads out only to find that the whole world is out of ketchup! He then continues on a daring race to catch the evil villain who has taken all the ketchup in order to restore his daily routine.

Initially, I drafted a flash fiction and graphic novel for this story. Then, I re-created the rising action of the story into an 8-panel comic drawn on graph paper. This comic was then traced onto an illustration board using burnishers, which are used by applying pressure to make small dents to trace. This initial process was very eye-opening into the world of design because it showed me just how much planning you have to do in order to achieve your vision. Once my comic was drawn and colored, I took a picture of the Illustration board using Genius Scan and transferred the photo onto Adobe Illustrator. This is where the real fun and creativity started! The pen tool, mesh tool, gradient tool and more all took a few days to learn how to use. A large component of recreating my comic digitally was trial and error. One of the biggest tips I learned was to pay attention to light and reflection as well as proportions. Because the real world is 3D, we don't often pay much attention to what makes objects look that way, but in Illustrator I had to take extra steps in order to make my objects look more dimensional. As I got better at utilizing Adobe Illustrator, it became more and more fun, and I became proud of my work, especially my ketchup and fries in the first panel. If I could change one thing, I would be easier on myself during the first few days of learning how to use Illustrator.
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