Educational Strip

This exercise wanted me to create the illustrations for a leaflet, the leaflet was called What is happening to my body it's all gone mad. I researched into the issue. I thought that with an issue like this that research would be the most important aspect because of how serious it would be to provide information. I used a few websites to gather information.

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/stress-anxiety-depression/coping-with-your-teenager/
https://www.healthline.com/nutrition/16-ways-relieve-stress-anxiety#section5

After the research I thought that it I wanted to go down a different path as I usually do with these exercises. I wanted to focus on the mental health aspect of puberty and how tough it can be when you have changes in hormones. I thought with today's current climate and how everyone is more open about mental health having a resource like this in schools will be so beneficial. I feel like I could go down lots of different paths however I focused on mental health issues that are not necessarily clinical. I wanted to focus on stress and anxiety which is quite apparent in teenagers and then is accelerated with puberty.

When I did some visual research for other illustrations surrounding mental illness they were all very dark and scary, even though I'm not discussing issues like this I decided that I wanted to have something fun and friendly but also informative.

The next thing I did was research further into stress and anxiety and the symptoms. I used the NHS website to create mind maps. This was a helpful step to focus my work.

 After further research I started to work out ways of tackling stress and anxiety and adjusted the methods to suit the audience as it's young teenagers I thought there was things that would not apply to them or be a bit out of their reach. There was a lot of information about sorting out finances and visiting lost friends.

For my leaflet I wanted to use the slides to tackle a different stress reliever.

I next went onto thumbnail sketching, as the exercise said this was an important part and I found it super useful, I do a lot of thumbnailing when completing exercises and this was no exception. It was a good way of furthering idea generation. I did not have a clear plan for how all the frames were going to fit together, it was quite loose. I know a lot of other people have gone down the comic book route where they tell a story however I thought that for my topic each frame can give a different piece of helpful info. What I focused on was the front cover illustration. I came up with a varied amount of ideas. The final idea I came up with uses stress and anxiety as heads looking over my character. I thought this would reflect how it feels to deal with the emotions that they are just watching over. 

Leaflet illustrations

Front cover illustration

I then sketched out my illustrations on procreate and coloured them.

I then used a mockup I found for a 5 page leaflet on a website. I played around with composition and layout and wrote out the info. 

What went well?

I thought the research for this topic was strong. I was trying to be as thorougher as possible and to explore all the options. I used multiple different sources of information. I also used the information to flesh out mindmaps. I explored ways of combating stress, I also used the age group in question to adjust what I put.

What did I learn?

Within this exercise I did learn a bit about how to create a cover illustration, I wanted to create something that would reflect my whole leaflet.


What could I have done better?

I really do not like drawing people and this is my biggest issue with this exercise and where I really suffered, I envisioned this exercise going into my portfolio on the basis of the research I had put in. I took the background work seriously however I thought I would then start drawing and it would all be fine. However that wasn't the case, I really did not like how clip art esque the illustrations looked, they looked cheap and tacky and just basic. Because I was struggling so much with anatomy and poses it then really impacted how creative I could be with colouring and style, I was just keeping it safe, this is not how I wanted this exercise to go but I feel like I have found my strengths and this is not one of them.