Shriek: A Junior Narrative Illustration by Luke Davies (2018)

For this project, we were assigned to produce a short story, with which we were to design a character. My short story produced only two characters, which gave me relatively limited choice to select which character to portray. In the end, I chose the antagonist (unnamed), because I thought the main character portrayed a spirit manifestation, rather than a physical appearance.

Initially, we created a rough sketch of our character based on various elements of other animals; this was rather interesting, as that I had to decide which animals to draw from, in the end I chose human, cheetah, and squid, to represent a character which was cunning, intelligent, and quick. We began with an initial sketch, of our character and their habitat. After this was completed, we began working with Adobe Illustrator, with which the final project was completed. This took tens of hours of work time, and a complex understanding of how the software behaves. Initially, the background proved difficult to create in an immersive way, as this required the usage of linear perspective, however, this challenge allowed me to more deeply examine my skills as an artist with the tools which were provided. My character was placed in the woodlands, as this is where I imagined it to live.