Graphic Narrative Evaluation

Does your final product reflect your original intentions?

My most original plans were the drawn ones where I has decided mainly on what I wanted to achieve, however when thinking of the designs and effectiveness of some of the scenes I changed a few things up, such as pages 2 and 3 as I originally had the foxes facing away, but decided to turn them around to face out of the book. I also changed page 6 to Tenko already being on the mountain because I found it could have been

too similar to the previous page. I did several re-drafts of the plans for page 9 as well because I could not decide what would be the most effective view. In the end I decided to have the opening to a dojo – courtyard type scene with simple house like designs as I thought it would be more effective and reasonable compared to the image I chose with many houses as the design would take a long time and may have been a less effective page because of this.

How well have you constructed your images?

I feel like my images have been constructed fairly well as they have been changed for each situation. The backgrounds have remained fairly constant with just resizing, and the characters have been changed for each page they have been in without having to completely redrawn them for every scene they appeared in. The consistency is well done as I decided early on that I did not want to use textures for the characters or the background, or just an overlay or filter from an image to create some of the background. I wanted to make everything from either drawing, rotoscoping or shapes and that is what I achieved. I feel like the drawing of the characters turned out well, however when it came to changing their positioning it was not always consistent in the proportions. I like the effects I created with the cherry blossom trees by using 2-4 different coloured designs and copying them and resizing them to create the trees instead of using block colours.

One thing I also like is that all the foxes, humans and other creatures have all been kept in the same ‘hand-drawn’ style with the black outlines and slightly anime style eyes. I feel like this was a much more effective creation for the characters compared to rotoscoping or using shapes to make them. They have all been constructed with Tenko being the original fox designed from drawing the outline over a fox and just using 3 different colours to create the characters.

How well have you used text to anchor your images

For the majority of the pages I feel like I have anchored the images well to the text, however for some I feel that there could be more links within the pictures to what the text is saying.

This picture is from page 4 and shows the link between Kasa setting the whole dojo on fire and follows what the text is saying, however I found that I did not put the glow overlay on Kasa as I did in the previous page which contradicts a little bit to what the text says (the glow around Kasa does not fade…).

I feel like this page is the most anchored to the text and very accurately illustrated the text. I had a lot going on in this picture, with a whole landscape to create for one page and the accuracy of the anchoring to follow. I feel like it also anchors to page 4 slightly with the smoke coming out of the windows from the fire inside the dojo.

I also decided to anchor the text to the page beneath it with simple designs based around cherry blossom trees and I found this very effective as I could incorporate a small bit of the story into some of the text pages such as this one and pages 4-5 with the flowers on fire/in water. I feel like this was not 100% necessary for the book design itself but added more to the text pages as, without it, they were a bit bare with only a little bit of text.

As far as the text page and the illustrations go, I feel like this is the least anchored as it has little meaning to it compared to the other pages before it. For the anchoring between text and image pages I feel like there could have been a different scene here, however it was difficult to design effectively so ended up showing the village itself instead of the child running towards the village.

Is your product suitable for your audience?

“between the ages of 4-8, the idea is for a story to be read to the child and it be a slightly more advanced ‘learning-to-read’ book..” I feel it is suitable for the target audience as I have used simplest words possible in the majority of cases in order for the ease of reading. The only part I find might be less suitable for the younger audience is the fire scene with Kasa as it could be viewed as a little bit scary in the story.I feel like my designs are defiantly suitable as I used bright colours and tried not to fill the space with too many intricate designs as I felt like there was a possibility of them getting distracted by the trees.

What do you like/dislike about the techniques you have used?

I like the shape tool as I found it very useful and effective to create the basis of my designs for the buildings that I created, the dojo, the building on page 9, and the majority of page 1 was created with an original picture behind it and I just used the rectangle and rounded rectangle to create each individual part of the image. After that I then used the transform options and used Skew, Distort, Perspective, and Warp to mould the shapes into exactly what I wanted them to be.

For the inside of the dojo I used a variation of techniques. I created the roof area using rotoscoping to get the different colours in the right places. I created the floor patterns with just a single rectangle and then using the brush tool to draw on the lines. I created the pillars, scrolls and windows using shapes again and just adding the extra detail on using the brush tool. For the slight shading on the pillars and scrolls I used the dodge to create the lighter areas and the burn to create the darker shades visible.

The mountain background was created using the brush and fill tool, then dodging and burning the edges in order to create the gradient effect similar to the pillars. I used a clipping mask on the snow at the top by making a white block with a jagged bottom and just placing it on top of the mountain layer and fitting in on. All the characters were created using the brush tool and colouring them in, I liked this technique as opposed to using shapes or rotoscoping as this was my desired style and I found it much more effective.

What do you like/dislike about how your final product looks?

I dislike some of the design on pages 9, more specifically the bushes and the ground in the bottom 1/3rd of the image, I feel like the berries are not quite right to follow on from my typical style, however without them the bushes looked quite bare and out of style. I struggled to add anything else more interesting to the scene because I wanted to keep the wide view of the building, but did not effectively manage to fill out the space around it.

My favourite page is definitely page 2, I love the background inside the dojo and I feel the characters are well drawn and incorporated into the scene and look in place. I feel like on a whole the characters are well designed and appear effectively throughout the whole book without too many inconsistencies.

I feel that in a couple of the scenes I could have added more detail into the sky, as in pages 5 and 9 the sky is mostly one solid colour instead of having a gradient, or some birds or something flying across, however I tried out a design for birds to be in the image and I did not feel like it fit into the image very well so I needed more time to find the best design.

Why did you include the content you used?

The font I used was Chalkboard SE, in my idea generation I found a variety of common fonts used by children's books and also interesting serif fonts, in the end I chose this one because it was easy to read and quite aesthetic.I chose to try and keep to bright colours for the character designs as this enabled them to stand out more from the background scenery that they were in.The images I chose to draw over/rotoscope I chose because they were stereotypically seen as a Japanese style and are obviously in this area because of the Kitsune story is originally from japan and I wanted to keep it in its origin country.

What signs, symbols or codes have your used in your work?

For my main human character I made her clothes red as it is a symbolism represented by the Kitsune mythology and also Binzuru a great healer in the country which links her to Umi and Tenko.My location choice was based on the origins of the Kitsune myth as it originated from Japan.I designed my fox characters so that they did not look 100% like a typical fox, I instead gave them slightly rounder heads and bigger eyes and this gave them a much friendlier feel to them.

What representations can be found in your work?

Both children featured in the story are portrayed as friendly and good at listening, which is a child in an ideal situation. There aren't particularly any other humans featured in this other than the village elder who is seen in pages 9-10 and is clothed in a grey robe from head to toe with a with-grey beard. This I feel is fairly stereotypical to what you would see in any movie with a dojo leader.I feel like there was a difficulty with defining the characteristics of the foxes initially as they are wild animals which have come into contact with humans; the kitsune are often portrayed in two ways, mischievous or friendly/charming. I made all of them out to be very friendly creatures, with Kasa as the most mischievous and this is actually the most accurately representation of a fox itself as they are not naturally friendly and comfortable around humans.

What style have you employed in your products?

When looking up ‘fox cartoon’ I found a lot of varying design style, some I really liked and others not as much. The first photo I found I really liked the big eyes and the more rounded ‘fluffier’ fox. The second one I incorporated their ideas of not only using facial expressions but also the position of the ears to show individual emotion and found this worked very effectively.

One book I liked the style of a lot was Kipper, I liked the simplicity of the characters within it, and even with the minimal detail you could easily tell what the character was meant to be, and also the backgrounds were simple and not crammed full of stuff and negative space was used to create the scene really well.

I also feel like I took a bit of my style from the well known anime series and games Pokémon as I especially liked the design of Eevee, with the quite thick fluffy tail, big eyes and simple fur design with just little tufts to emphasize the texture.

I feel like the style I used was quite simplistic, using fairly basic colour differences and only small details of drawn texture on the white chest area. I felt this was more appropriate and effective compared to having a lot of different colour shades and texture overlays.

What were the strengths and weaknesses of the pre-production and planning

I feel like the amount of planning we did before production really helped during the 2 week production time as I had a firm outline of design ideas and techniques I was going to use. Doing a test page also greatly helped because it allowed me to make sure that my whole production would go smoothly by ironing out all the possible techniques which would make the production more difficult and the book take longer to complete.

I feel like I managed my time very well, mainly due to the fact that in the week where we were doing test pages I managed to create a vital background which was used in 3 different pages and also the main characters along with one fully completed page while I was still ahead of schedule. This gave me a great head start and gave me a chance to complete all of my pages and then go back to them in the last 2 sessions in order to improve them and add more detail in order to create a more effective book.

I also managed to reuse my foxes because I could just cut out their ears and rotate them and refine them in order to create different expressions for each situation.

Historical and cultural context

My work is obviously of a slightly lower standard than typical best-selling children's books due to the fact that the creators of those have much more experience, skill and time to create their books.

A book I found similar to mine is a Japanese children's tale called Kintaro and this is a short story of a child with big strength and defeats strong enemies and then lives happily for the rest of his life at the end. The small illustrations I found were also similar to mine in the sense that it was minimalistic and did not feature a lot of textures and shading to the characters and background.

I mixed cultures up a little through my book, as I used things from typical Japanese books and folk lore, however I adapted it for the more westernised style as the book is read left-to-right instead of a typical Japanese book which is read in reverse order.

You can see here that the design of my book is also quite different, partially due to this language difference but also with the style of characters as the typical Manga style is seen a lot in Japanese books with the large eyes which take up a lot of the face (which I have slightly incorporated) and also the style of the body which I chose not to do for my characters.