Artist Biography
This project titled The Values of Narrative within Storytelling is a comic telling a segment of a story that expresses parts of the Hero’s Journey. The viewer must infer information based on context clues and subtly hinted information to glean the characters’ intentions and the reason for the location. The stories I am most inspired by are those from my childhood, including fantasy novels, comic books, and folktales. This digital illustration project is a study on the many facets of a story including the use of dialogue, a classically organized narrative, and digitally painted visuals to tell this fantasy story.
My digital paintings exude a comic aesthetic, as do my illustrations and water color paintings. I tend to use splashy, simple interactions between the characters to set a realistic stage for tense conversation. The facial illustrations breathe life into the characters and the viewer can easily get a feel for their personalities as they read the comic.
Thesis Abstract
The topic of this thesis involves exploring the primary components of narrative storytelling across multiple social entertainment platforms like cinema, sound design, illustration, and animation, as well as how the hero’s journey appears in these forms. The project was heavily inspired by children’s stories and classic fairy tales. The goal is to investigate all facets of storytelling in a variety of situations. Initial questions that were asked in light of this consideration included: what are the values of prequels and sequels within a franchise? What makes a story’s characters relatable? What are the steps taken in sequential storytelling? The literature review of this thesis investigates these questions and answers them with information backed by credible and scholarly sources. The most influential of these sources include: The Hero With A Thousand Faces, by Joseph Campbell, Cinema and Media Studies, from Oxford Bibliographies, and The Art of Storytelling, Khan Academy’s informative inside look at Pixar’s storytelling process. The result of this research is an original comic style narrative with its own cast of characters that tell a unique story of their own.