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Feedback: A Junior Narrative Illustration by Shirwille Gutierrez (2018)

My flash fiction is about an anxiety filled teenager named Seth taking a very important test for one of his classes. Once finished, Seth finds himself in a constant loop of reentering the same classroom over and over again. All with the same pattern, him entering, being gestured to sit and take the test, then leaving and opening the door to the same exact room he had just been in. All this happened with the clock still winding down and resulting with him having less and less time to finish the test given. This loop was finally broken once Seth had given up and let go to the severe pressure and stress placed upon him.

When we were first creating our hybrid character illustrations, we were tasked with making a list of characteristics correlated with our characters in our flash fiction. We then had to connect these characteristics with those of animals resembling the same traits. For example, my character, Seth, could be described as Timid, Anxious and Tense. So, I connected these characteristics with those of a Chameleon (timid) , an Elephant (tense), and a Fox (anxious). To create a hybrid, we tried different combinations of the animals in sketches we made in our sketchbooks. Once we got a combination we liked, we moved on to using Adobe Illustrator. After retrieving pictures of the chosen animals on the internet, we had to trace them to create the hybrid. By adding more and more layers of shadows and highlights onto the existing art boards, we slowly began to put our hybrid character together. For the positioning of the character we took example pictures of people in positions similar to those we would use for our illustration. The second task was to create the background we would be placing our hybrid character into. For my background, I created a darker toned classroom to help portray the tense situation that brought so much angst to my main character Seth. After all the time this illustration took, I am quite pleased with the result and glad I spent as much time as I did.
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