On Deaf Ears: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Christien Skousen (2016)

In my story, a man has to overcome his tendency to mask his distaste of his surroundings with fantasy and confront the reality of his situation for his survival. After accidentally offending a roughshod portion of a gang, he has to make a mad dash through the city, and though he imagines it as a fun experience at first, when he crashes through a storefront window and the alarm goes off, Davis has to acknowledge the very real trouble he is in.

My initial sketches were very rough, and were less cartoonish than the final result. I modeled my aesthetic after that of Calvin and Hobbes, trying to focus in more on expressive lines and deliberate faux zaniness to emphasis the struggle between perceiving reality as is and instead relating to a fantasy. Once I finished my rough sketch, I taped it onto the nice board of paper and used the burnisher to transfer my initial ideas onto that board. From there, I went over the rough shape with a black sharpie marker to give it the thicker, more expressive look I wanted. I filled in with colored pencil and then used the app Genius Scan to get a pdf of my ''finished'' product. Though Genius Scan warped the colors and made an altogether unappealing pdf, it perfectly preserved the shape so that I could then take to Illustrator. I used to pen tool to outline the shapes of my art and add back the original sense of color and style. In the future, I would be more attentive to various gradients and trying to preserve the initial art form which I started with, which was difficult as I was not adept at the pen tool and used it to make a simulacrum of my original art, instead of an adaption. But over all, I am very pleased with the way that this piece of work shaped out.