Stymie: A Junior Narrative Illustration by Elayna Parkhurst (2018)

My flash fiction story is about a girl who cannot come up with any new or creative ideas. The story follows her quest to get over this creative block and the lengths she goes to so that she can satisfy the need to create something unique and interesting. The main character is highly critical of herself, but also unwilling to give up. Unable to find stimulus anywhere else, the main character ends up at the beach to try and gain inspiration from there.

Creating this illustration was a process that involved many trials and thoughtful steps. The first thing I did was brainstorm what characteristics my character had, what landscape the story took place in, and what my character would be wearing. The character I created has a hyena body and head to represent how they are highly critical. The shark fin is on my creature to show how they are persistent because sharks are creatures that are constantly moving. The light on my creature is from an anglerfish for the purpose of showing how they have a difficult time seeing the whole picture because with the light an anglerfish can only see what is right in front of them. The outfit I chose for my character is a plain grey shirt because they are having a very unimaginative moment and are not able to think of anything interesting to wear. I chose the beach as my landscape because the story ends at the beach and the character finally finds inspiration there. Since we needed linear perspective in our backgrounds I used the water and grass to show this. In Illustrator I used the pen tool to create outlines of the different animals I used for my character and then continued to use the pen tool to outline my background.