02 Visual Design for Print & Screen: Narrative Composition

Process

Before I could begin working on this assignment, I needed to choose a fairy tale story from the list provided in class. After skimming through almost all of the stories listed, I decided to choose a story called A Riddling Tale. I chose this story because it was fairly short, but would provide me with enough of a plot to be able to work with multiple story boards. I also liked this story because the ending had somewhat of a suspenseful element, which I thought would be really fun to portray using the graphical elements we talked about in class.

After choosing my story, I began to plan out how I wanted to portray it in Illustrator. Before planning out the story boards on paper, however, I felt most comfortable starting in Illustrator, composing my characters and different backdrops that I may want to use. Here is an image of my initial ‘drawings’, as I was working through my characters and color choices.

After I felt comfortable with working in Illustrator and with the different elements of my story, I worked with a pen and paper to loosely sketch out how I wanted to structure my story boards. Admittedly, I went back and forth between my sketches and Illustrator during this process. When I felt comfortable with the layout of one page on paper, I would go into Illustrator and make it, then return to the paper to sketch out the next artboard. Here is the paper with my artboard sketches.

As I worked in Illustrator, I was able to decide on the colors that I would use to tell the story. Because we were only allowed a max of 3 colors, I waited until all of my artboards were finished to introduce color. I decided that because one of the most important elements of my story was the time of day, I would use two different blues (light and dark) to communicate that concept. Finally, I used the color green to clearly communicate the natural/floral component of the story.