Jasmine's NM2208 Blog: Final Project

The theme for this final project is culture. Our group had decided to create a storybook for children age 9-12. We are given different roles in this project and I’m selected to be the illustrator. When I think of culture, I only have Singapore context in mind therefore I can only think of Chinese New Year, Hari Raya, Deepavali and the different races in Singapore. When we asked to propose our own storyline, I came out with this: one non-Chinese kid follows his Chinese friend on Chinese New Year. During the process, we can try to list down the different things that happen in Chinese New Year.

After some discussion with the group mates, we decided to choose this storyline instead: There is this child who dislikes Chinese New Year. On the Eve of Chinese New Year, his grandma gives him a beautiful Jade. This Jade has magical powers and it brought the child back to the olden times. He met the Twelve Zodiac. That is the Year of Tiger but the Tiger is missing!!! Therefore the eleven Zodiac animals are very anxious since the Chinese New Year is coming. The Tiger must be come back on time or else there will be no Chinese New Year that year because the "NIAN" monster will come back and attack the villagers. The child had a great and funny adventure together with the eleven Zodiacs in finding/saving the Tiger. Along the way, the child grew to understand the meaning of Chinese New Year better.

We came out with the following rough storyboard and rough initial sketches:

Since I'm the illustrator, I started my part on drawing the boy, the mother and the grandma. Below are the prototype that I drew:

During the project meeting, we decided to divide our tasks and I'm asked to do the storybook from page 1 to 7, mainly on the present time before the boy went back to the past. After we have done our parts, I helped to combine everything together and to add in the text to the story. One of the main problem encountered is my partner who is also the role of illustrator, he used the software photoshop while I used illustrator. When I tried to combine everything some of the thing are inconsistent and I had to make it consistent first before I can combine them together. Finally, below are our final story prototypes:

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