“A Journey to Italy” Black ink and watercolor, July 25, 2022

This is the Sequential Narrative project, a major project in which we were tasked with creating a short story through images about ourselves as some sort of hero. I chose to base my story on the hero’s origin, and it’s about the first time that I realized that I could make art for the sake of evoking emotion in others, especially happiness. My hero stumbles upon this realization when she travels to Italy, a personal life goal of mine, and draws the things she sees. She meets a tourist along the way who compliments her work, and she gives him the page, thinking he would appreciate it much more. He tells her that she could sell her art and make a lot of people as happy as she made him, and she takes it to heart. This realization is based on my own feelings about my art. I’ve drawn for people in the past who were elated to receive my art, and it always feels great to receive their thanks and smiles. I hope to make a career out of it.

The process of creating this story was a very long one, with the brainstorming spanning back to the start of the 3 Drawings project. I created two separate pages of 12+ thumbnails for each panel, trying to get as much detail down as I could before I started my final version. Panels were moved around and entire locations were scrapped. Overall I found the experience of this project very challenging but rewarding.