For our second big project in design class we made illustrations based on the short stories we wrote in English class. My story is about a man named Richard D. Noone, a talentless wannabe social media star with a massive ego. This ego of his causes him to expect free handouts everywhere, however he doesn’t realize that nobody actually knows who he is. The story starts out with him living with his sister, but he’s kicked out after not paying his share of the rent for three months. With nowhere to stay, our protagonist must find a place to spend the night before dark. I thought a character like this would be a fun story idea. For My illustration, I chose the part where Richard gets thrown out of his sister’s apartment. Instead of drawing humans, students were asked to create creatures to represent our main protagonists. We took parts of animals that represent our character’s personality traits and fused them into one. The creature I made to represent Richard’s personality traits has a goldfish’s head, a chameleon’s body, sloth legs, a snake’s tail, and a pair of wasp wings. The Goldfish’s head is meant to represent his obliviousness to the fact that nobody knows or likes him. The chameleon’s body is because he tries to be things that he isn’t, while the sloth legs demonstrate his laziness. The snake’s tail and the wasp wings demonstrate a few more of his more negative qualities, like how he’s really annoying and nobody really likes him. Both snakes and wasps are commonly treated as pests that nobody really wants around but they have to deal with anyway.
To create this image I made an edit of an apartment building hallway in Adobe Photoshop using images from the internet, then traced I it in Adobe Illustrator. I used one point perspective to give it a cool three dimensional vibe. Finally, I inserted my creature being thrown out of one of the doors and added the finishing touches like the shadows and glares.
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