First Idea: Autobiographical Comic
I wanted to create a comic with a focus on showing and dealing with depression, loss, and grief and having it detail my personal expierence with all of those and how they have affected me. But at some point, I felt that the idea of using my own personal story for the comic was becoming too personal and insular so I ended up dropping this idea but retaining the desire to take a closer look at these issues regarding depression and grief.
Sketches of my father, mother, and myself drawn in various visual styles.
First set of storyboards.
Second set of storyboards.
Second Idea: Adventure/Journey Comic
I began to develop an idea for creating a fictional story that would showcase what depression can look and feel like through the eyes of a young girl who enters a bizarre world, akin to Alice in Wonderland. The story would focus on a 12 year old girl named Sarah whose mother dies in a car accident. During a trip to the lake with her father, she ends up in another world filled with creatures and people representative of her depression. She must navigate through this world in order to go back home while trying to prevent herself from losing hope.
First sketch showing this young girl's darker thoughts personified as a grim reaper-like figure, whispering horrible things to her.
I played around with ink using compressed air to manipulate the ink into different shapes and splatters. The idea being to create what some of the creatures of The Other World could look like.
Second ink blot experimentation with the first offical sketch of Sarah looking at a fish-like blob that would end up appearing within the story.
Character/reference sheet of Sarah.
Character/reference sheet of Amy, Sarah's mother.
Unfinished character sketch of Nathan, Sarah's father.
The Other World residents and creatures
The Other World contains some strange creatures and even stranger denizens. Each of them were based on symptoms of depression and/or common occurances that come with the mental illness. Sarah would encounter each and everyone of these characters while trying to make it back home.
Left: Watercolor and ink sketches of Red Mask, the personification of the emotion Anger.
Right: Ink sketches of two of the creatures from The Other World.
Right: Continued sketches of Red Mask's appearence. Before coming up with the idea of personifed symptoms of depression wearing masks, I played around with different ways of how to personfiy the symptoms.
Inked sketches of sadness and anxiety.
Inked sketches of guilty and fatigue.
Inked sketch of anxiety and a couple skeches of apathy.
Sketches of the personified symptoms fatigue, anger, and sadness with their masks displaying the emotion they represent.
Sketches of the personified symptoms guilt, anxiety, and apathy with their masks displaying the emotion they represent.
Comic Pages
From the beginning, I wanted this project to be a comic book. However, it became clear that the story began to suffer when my focus shifted more to the visuals. Before changing the format of how the story would be presented, I managed to sketch out rough outlines of the first three pages and inked two of the three.
Logo Development
The logo took some time to develop. I was caught between making the logo either done in rough brush-lettering or in a cleaner, more cursive style. Ultimatly, I went with the rougher, thicker brush-lettering for the final logo design.
Final vectorized logo.
Chapter Illustrations
With the format of the story now changed to that of a chapter book, I wanted to still have some illustrative elements. I drew 11 pen and ink illustrations that were incorporated into the chapters.
Chapter 1 illustration.
Preface illustration.
Upper Left: Second illustration of chapter 1, Amy driving Sarah to school.
Lower Left: Unused illustration for chapter 2, Nathan waiting for Sarah in the school's attendance office.
Upper Right: Chapter 2 illustration, Sarah with her grandmother standing in front of her mother's casket.
Left: Chapter 4 illustration, the personification of apathy standing in the middle of a lake.
Middle: Unused chapter 6 illustration, the personification of anger with fire covering her hands.
Upper Right: Unused chapter 7 illustration, the personification of sadness sitting in a pond.
Lower Right: Chapter 8 illustration, cave bats.
Left: Chapter 9 illustration, Sarah being dragged into darkness.
Right: Chapter 10, Amy hugging Sarah before going back home.
Small illustrations added on each first chapter page.
Page Spreads
With the story and illustrations complete, I designed the spreads in Indesign. I set the document up to 5x8 and by far, this has been the most intensive typographic project I have done. Some of the illustrations would take up an entire page while others are spot illustrations placed within the type.
Printed Books
With the story now edited and checked for spelling and grammar, I had the page spreads printed and case-bound three physical copies of the story. The constuction of each book took over the course of a week with covers, spines, and book cloth cut at the same time.
