Exercise: Educational strip.

This exercise is about making an illustrated strip for young teenagers, helping to cope with the onset of puberty.

I thought that this was an interesting challenge. I need to make five frames for the strip, which is relatively short if I want to approach it in a narrativising way. I did some brainstorming. I decided that I wanted to approach this from a slightly different angle, since the exercise left it open as to which area of puberty to tackle. It’s such a broad topic and there are so many aspects which are so often completely left out of the discussion.

After thinking about it, I decided I didn’t want to just deal with the pure biology of it, since this is usually the first and often the only thing that kids are exposed to when it comes to puberty in the education system. I figured I would go for a topic that is really endemic and seldom spoken about with teenagers, and that’s the issue of media representation, body dysmorphia, self-esteem and general body issues.

I went about doing some research and looked up the informational pages about puberty on a number of sites, the NHS and the HSE. Both of which I found quite clinical and maybe not that useful for young teens. What I actually found most useful when working on my script for the exercise was the page by Planned Parenthood. However none of these sites had any illustrations. I thought about what style I wanted to go for and came up with a few ideas for inspiration.

Firstly a couple of Nintendo game series came to mind. Splatoon has an interesting modern style, the main cast is depicted as preteens and it’s really fashion forward, using modern street styles as its aesthetic base. A selection of concept art can be found here.

The Pokémon series, currently in the midst of a huge resurgence in popularity, also has a very youthful, street-fashion image in its character design. Particularly iconic for the series is the work of veteran concept artist Ken Sugimori, a selection of his character artwork for the series can be found here.

Another source of inspiration that came to mind is the relatively recent, popular and well received manga My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness, which has a really beautiful and quirky artstyle.

 

I went about writing a script and doing rough thumbnails.

 

I drew my main character for the separate cover illustration.

Next I did another page of thumbnails to finalise everything before going on.

I inked and drew out final versions of everything.

Before scanning them in and tidying them up digitally.

I think this is my favourite work I’ve done for the course. I like the design of my character and I think the comic reads quite well.

 

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References

HSE.ie. (2019). Puberty. [online] Available at: https://www.hse.ie/eng/health/az/p/puberty/introduction.html [Accessed 3 Mar. 2019].

Kabi, N. (2016). My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness. Seven Seas Entertainment.

NHS. (2019). Stages of puberty. [online] Available at: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/sexual-health/stages-of-puberty-what-happens-to-boys-and-girls/ [Accessed 3 Mar. 2019].

Planned Parenthood. (2019). Puberty In Females and Males. [online] Available at: https://www.plannedparenthood.org/learn/teens/puberty [Accessed 3 Mar. 2019].