The Life Struggles: A Junior Visual Narrative Comic by Colin Dickerson (2016)

In English class I was assigned to write a flash fiction, I choose to write the story on an average teenagers struggle with procastionation. I decided to choose the distraction of the essay being a cell phone because I know a lot of kids have a problem of being on their phone while doing homework. In the story I talk about how the character had time in school to start the essay but didn't take advantage of it. I choose this topic because it is very relatable to most students.

In Design class I changed this story into a comic. I started by brainstorming which parts of the story I wanted to include in my comic, then I planned out everything in my notebook. It was difficult choosing which scenes I would create in my comic and even after sketching it all out and beginning work in Illustrator I still decided to add a scene to make the story flow better for the viewer. I took those plans to a graph paper sketch, where for two days I sketched out how my panels would look and what would go inside them. Then I took those sketches and used burnishers to carve into a cardboard illustration board and then colored them in to complete the board. After all of this I used Genius Scan, an app, to scan my project onto the computer. This project was my first time using Adobe Illustrator so our class had some time to practice before starting the project. In Illustrator, during this project, the pen tool was my best friend. I used it to make clean outlines of my drawing so I could fill them with color. If I did it again I would probably do more on my illustration board because looking back at it I needed to add a panel to really show my story which I was able to do during Illustrator but it made it a bit more complex.