Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Allegra: A Junior Narrative Illustration by Mahika Gupta (2018)

My flash fiction was about a young, musically gifted girl in a forest who started off unable to gather the courage to sing. Her metaphorical world started off bland, gray, and cold as she struggled to gain confidence, and finally turned to color when she drew inspiration from a woodpecker pecking away at a tree. Using the beat to fuel her music, the girl (Allegra) began to sing, restoring color to the once barren forest. After this experience, she learns to believe in herself and use her voice as her inspiration.

In my original sketches, I combined a dolphin, turtle, and canary. The dolphin was because she was elegant and graceful while also radiating power, the turtle because she started off as shy and unconfident, and the canary beak to illustrate her beautiful voice. One of the biggest issues I ran into while trying to actually draw my animal in Illustrator was how to put her in clothes. If I had more time, I would have tried to put a jacket on her but overall, I’m happy with the way she looks. I used linear perspective in my background to give the illusion of a 3D world. I tracked my river and row of trees back to a point on my horizon line and made the trees smaller and smaller to make it look like it was going off into the distance. To create both my character and the background, I mainly used the pen tool on Adobe Illustrator to trace images I found online, then make my own alterations using the brush and puppet warp tools. The background is split into a dull, gray side of the river and a more bright, prosperous side where the dolphin and the bird are. This was done to show how Allegra has the ability to make any place more beautiful with her presence, and even more so her voice.
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