For the first assignment I chose the story (out of two available) of the child climbing a tree and being carried away by a bird.
This was the first draft:
My original thought had been to use the webtoon format of narrower panels stacked on to of each-other but the panoramic shots worked so well in the sky/landscape shots that I had to try it. Then, when I realised that I wouldn't be able to fit everything into one A4, I went traditional instead. After some feedback, I made a few changes and although I couldn't fit the entire story, it still worked quite well.
The critique on this was that the yellow could've made been present in all frames, to make it more clear that it's the same child. And I did try that but I couldn't get it to look right; the yellow shoe was sort of a last minute detail because having the yellow only in the last frame didn't work, but next time I'll plan it out better to make the red thread more visible. I'd really like to try and have more fun with the layout of the actual panels as well, like spreads and inserts etc - I'm also partial to drawing outside the lines/frames and treating the page as a whole image rather than a series of frames to be read left-right-up-down. There were quite a few creative ideas in that area at the meeting this morning, so lots of inspiration to be drawn from that.
