Narrative Image Making: The Mermaid

For this project, we were asked to create a book cover and inside spread for the short story of The Mermaid. I initially had wanted to try and do something dark, combining Film Noir and Manga but in the end it didn't really work out like I had planned. I then decided to jump from Manga and make something a little bit more comic book based.

This is the result of my center page. I know ideally, a center page would already be well into a story, but as this is so short, it didn't make any sense. I wanted to keep the colour scheme very simple and similar to that of a mass-printed publication.

My process wasn't too long. I started out by drawing the characters in my sketchbook and made a mock-up story board including them. When that was finished, I re-did it on the computer using my Wacom Tablet and Adobe Photoshop CS6. To clean the image up further, I then took my rough draft into Adobe Illustrator CS6 and traced my image, switching between mouse and pen. Doing this in Illustrator was the most beneficial, as it is mostly all vector based, which never loses quality no matter how big you resize your image. Perfect for print.