Exercise: Educational strip

Key points from the brief: 

- Produce an illustrated strip of up to five frames for use in schools explaining to young teenagers how to cope with the onset of puberty. 

- It is suggested that you use metaphor and humour. But take care not to trivialise a serious message 

- Provide a single illustration of your character for use on the front cover. 

- The leaflet is called What’s happening to my body? It’s all going mad!

- You need to submit all stages of the development process – thumbnails, visuals and client visuals for the cartoon strip and the stand-alone illustration. 

The process

This exercise was quite challenging to me since I think the information to be included should be given by a professional on this complex topic. I was a bit doubtfull about how to approach the topic, specially becuase the changes that we go throufg on this age are so many, and it's also different (very) for girls and boys; so to norrow down I chose to focus on gilrs, which by experience I understand better.

I worked on the story with my Ipad and started by creating a strip layout. Then I sketched some first ideas just to see what type of images would come to my mind to represent this topic. That's how I came up with the idea of a "journey", teenage years are a transition that takes you from being a child to becoming an adult. In this moment I also realized that my approach would be more subtle and even emotional, than funny. 

After that I went on to writing the text of the strip. I found this very interesting because it made very obvious to me that I needed to have a text as a starting point to then develop the images that would better serve this text. I worked on layers so everytime when I was developing new ideas, I'd work on top of the last layer and refine what I had. 

​Cartoon Client Visuals 

​Character Illustration

For my character I explored some different ideas. At the beginning I felt they were too much in my "fashion style" and I wanted to find something more approachable. It was also challenging to represent a person of this age and to achieve a final result that doesn't look too childish but also not too old.

​After some trying I also though I wanted this girl to be doing something that teenagers would do, so I decided she'd be wearing headphones and listening to music. I also had some thoughts about how the character looks and if girls could identify themselves with her. I went for a blue hair which is more whimsical and bring more inclusion. Her skin-tone is a light brown, trying to achieve a mid-tone skin color. 

Regarding my chosen materials, I went for pencil colors since it's a media that I'm very interested in developing further, and I also considered to be the right one to give some fun/careless look to the character and I chose a vibrant  color palette.