Graphic Narrative Evaluation

Use this template to help you evaluate your project.

You should give specific details about your work.

You should provide both written and visual examples to explain your project.

You should find areas to praise in your work. Be specific about why you think they are good or why you are proud of them.

You should also find areas that could be improved. Look for areas that you could make better if you went back to them. Be specific about what you would improve.

Add additional slides as you need to. Don’t be restricted by what is here.

Any blank slides should be deleted before submission.

Does your final product reflect your original intentions?

I feel my final product reflects my original intentions very well. I believe this because there wasn’t really a lot of change in my book from my digital flat plans and storyboards in the form of the art style which I said I would do in my original planning. The big thing that changed a lot from my original intentions and even from my flat plans was the characters. The look of the characters, especially the wolf is completely different in my final product when compared to any of my earlier designs and ideas, A lot of this is because I didn’t’ spend a lot of time on the drawing, but also is because I didn’t have a clear picture in my head for what I wanted to do with the characters until I actually got around to doing them for my final piece of work, which is not very good, this is also shown because my final characters don’t really look like anything out of any other book either, this is due to me not really using any inspiration for them from anything else, when you look at the three little pigs picture on my mood board, you can’t really see any resemblance between these pictures and the pigs in my book, the only similar thing is the fact that they are actually pigs, and this really isn’t a good thing, I should have got my ideas sorted out earlier to make sure that my work turned out good, I got lucky that some ideas came to my head when they did or I would have been stuck when it came to actually creating the characters. However the characters on the page didn’t really change place and the difference between the characters on the test page that I made and the final work that I created was non existent, so luckily I thought of how to create the characters early enough to get the design and ideas down somewhere first before I put them onto my final work.

For the backgrounds I felt that the final product really did reflect my original intentions, however this is because my background is very simple and I could get a clear idea of what to do for it very early on in production, this is seen as early as my digital flat plans, and even a bit in my drawn storyboards, where the background doesn’t change very much. However things like the buildings have been made to look more cartoony and realistic and the trees have been added a lot more, to a few of the slides to make the scene look more busy.

The last thing graphics wise that I did was the wolf, and I feel that my wolf looks, like the pigs, incredibly different to every other rendition on other parts of my work, except for the test slide. This is because I didn’t want to take too much influence from any other wolf in other renditions of the three little pigs, as I wanted my wolf to look a lot different to other peoples and to look as unique as possible.

Evolution of the three little pigs

Evolution of the Wolf

How well have you constructed your images?

I feel overall I have constructed my images pretty well, especially for the amount of time that I had to do them in, and how many times I had to remake the same character in different positions, I made each of the pigs at least three times, and the wolf three times as well. Because of this the quality of the images suffered slightly because of how many pictures I actually had to make and the amount of time I had to make them. This really showed on the difference between the different pigs, there really isn’t one apart from the colours and the top hat on the blue pig. I actually wanted to make bigger changes and differences between the pigs, however when I did the planning I found out that I didn’t have a ton of time allocated to actually make the pigs or the wolf, and because of this a bit of quality was lost, which I sacrificed to make sure there as more variation in the pigs movement. For the backgrounds there isn’t a lot of variation, however the background itself is very good and didn’t really need changing from page to page because I feel I constructed it really well and made sure that the image would work for all of the pages. As for the wolf I feel this ended up being really good, I really liked the construction of it and the way it turned out after I put it into the pages with the rest of my work, I feel it turned out really well and gave the effect that I wanted which is the way I wanted the wolf to look menacing, but a little bit cheeky at the same time, and I felt that this would be the correct look for a children’s book as I don’t want to scare the children. The construction when compared to other children’s books like other renditions of the three little pigs books ends up looking average overall, but I feel this is because these other books had a lot more time and money put into them and if I had the same resources and time put into my book I feel it could have looked overall as good, if not better. For the images I didn’t really use texturing all that much, I kept it to a minimum because I wanted my book to really obviously be a bright and cartoony kids book, and I didn’t want anything looking too realistic, because of this I kept the texturing to a minimum, another way I kept it cartoony and relevant to the audience, which was children, was by making the text on the page quite big and easy to see, and by using incredibly bright colours, which is a recurring theme that I found in a lot of kids books that I found while researching earlier in the project. Another thing about my work, and the way I constructed it is that I used the a very similar back drop for most of the pages and then put pre made assets onto the page, such as the houses, trees and the characters, which filled in the back drop and gave it life.

Differently positioned pigs

Differently positioned wolf

How well have you used text to anchor your images

I feel I have used text to anchor my images incredibly well, when you look across my pages there really isn’t anything in the text or in the picture that isn’t reflected in it’s counter part, for example on page ten, it says in the text “And they chased the wolf off in time for dinner” and then in the picture itself it shows the three little pigs chasing the wolf into the forest, and this is pretty true for all of my pages, the text anchors to my images very well. Because I had to cut down the book it would have been hard for me to keep a lot of the things from the original story in the book, a lot of things got cut, like in my book there is no old woman at the beginning of the book, which is a character in the other three little pigs books I researched, however in mine I had to cut her from the book as there just wasn’t room, however I kept as many characters as I could in the book, and as much of the original story by using speech bubbles to keep some of the text, and famous lines in my work that would otherwise of had to be cut from my rendition of the story because of lack of space and time. An example of a line that would have had to be cut if it wasn’t for the speech bubbles was on page 4, where the wolf is talking to the pig and the famous line from the three little pigs is traded between them, that is “Little pig, Little pig, let me come in!” and then the pig responds “no, no, not by the hair on my chinny chin chin”. Things like this is another reason why I feel my text anchor’s to my images well, it’s because I used speech bubbles to get extra lines of dialogue into my work, that otherwise wouldn’t have been there and as a whole makes my book a lot more interesting.

Is your product suitable for your audience?

I feel my product is suitable for the audience that I defined in my proposal which was 4-9 year olds, and while 7, 8 and 9 year olds seem like they would be a little bit old for my book, as they would probably be reading things that are a little bit older and more mature, however some kids this age, now a days actually have problems reading and need books that are marketed towards them but are still a little bit easier to use for if they aren’t as confident with their ability to read. However I should really change the reading age to 4-6 year olds, this is because this is the actual reading age for my book, and spreading it to 9 is only for people that are not as proficient at reading, as well as me overestimating how mature my book was and the age range that would actually read my book.

In my proposal I said that my book would be unisex, however if you look at the stereotypes I feel that my book is more targeted towards a male audience, there are parts of my book, such as the whole book being main characters and then the pigs using swords and violence, a primarily male stereotypically thing that they enjoy so I feel that I should have put my gender stereotype as male as this is really the main audience for my book.

The classes that I said would buy this book would be pretty much anyone, and this is one of the the audiences that I continue to agree with, I don’t see why anyone couldn’t buy my book and I don’t see how it isn’t really suitable for all the different classes and for locations I said that it would only be sold in English speaking countries, which again I still agree with because as it’s made by me and only me, unlike bigger chains of book sellers that have more money and resources, I would have to correctly translate my book into other languages and this would take a lot of time and effort which I didn’t have when creating the book.

What do you like about the techniques you have used?

The first thing I really like about the techniques I have used is the grass effect which I used on all the pages, I did this by getting a green box, putting it to the bottom of the screen and positioning it correctly, and where I want it and put a green to slightly darker green gradient over it, I then continued to go onto Google and get a picture of some grass, making sure that it was high resolution, and then put this into Photoshop, after doing this I used the colour range tool to select the grass blades and then layer via copied and colour overlaid the grass blades to make them green and cartoony and positioned them over the green floor. This created the grass floor which I used for all of my pages and I really feel like it turned out really well and because of this I used it for each page because it was a good back drop. I liked it because it actually gave the effect of grass without just being a bright green square at the bottom of the page, or being a hyper realistic patch of grass at the bottom which sticks out and looks silly, I struck a happy medium and I feel it looks really good and fits really well.

Another technique that I used in my work that I really liked is the way I made the wooden house. The way I made the house was by using a house I found on Google and then rotoscoping the basic shape of the house, I then used the select tool to cut a plank of wood off of the wooden house and used the colour selection tool to select the main parts of the wooden plank and then layer via copied this plank multiple times and placed them on the side of the house, creating the wooden effect of the house. I really like this effect because I found it really hard to create a wooden house from scratch, that actually looked wooden and not brown and I didn’t want to just rotoscope and then just colour range the entire house as this would be plagiarism, so I did this method, it turned out really well and I like the look of it due to the colour scheme and it actually looking like a wooden house.

What do you dislike about the techniques you have used?

• Reference specific tools you used with images

I dislike the way that I didn’t put a stroke around the edge of everything, and while this seems like a small thing, it turned out looking annoying to me because some of the thing on my work have a stroke on it, while some of the work doesn’t have a stroke and this ends up looking a little bit annoying. I should either have put a stroke on everything or put a stroke on nothing, however I ended up putting a stroke on around 70% of the things on the page, and I don’t really like the way this turned out. If I was to redo my work I would probably go and make sure the stroke is consistent, and techniques like this that stay constant make your work look better and more professional. When I went and looked at other books, such as the other three little pigs books, their techniques stayed consistent throughout the book, while mine don’t, and this would be a big improvement if it did. An example of this happening would be on page five, where the house has a stroke around it, however the pig doesn’t and this ends up looking not as good as it could do if the pig had a stroke around him.

Another technique that I used that I ended up disliking was the inner stroke on the door, it didn’t turn out the way that I wanted it due to it looking like the door is embedded into the castle, however I should have used an outer glow, and by doing this it would have looked like it was slightly sticking out. Another problem with this technique is the way that I have never used it at any other time in the book and this makes the effect look weird and out of place which is something I was actively trying to avoid as I was really trying to follow a theme through my book as this is what I found to be very successful when researching other books of similar age ranges earlier in the project.

What do you like about how your final product looks?

Another thing I like about the way that the book looks is the way that the colours are so vibrant. I decided on this when I decided on my age range which ended up being a younger audience, because of this factor I decided against using a lot of dark colours as they don’t look as interesting and settled on using bright and vibrant colours which would make everything pop out of the page and look interesting. When doing research I noticed other children’s illustrators where using a similar idea and making their work bright and colourful for a younger audience, this includes “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly” and “The Very hungry caterpillar”, which are both bright and colourful books targeted towards younger children.

When you look at my work you can see how the art style stays the same from page to page, I like this a lot and feel it is incredibly important for a book with illustrations to keep a style which is concurrent throughout the book. I have found this in other books of the same genre, which means children’s story books, that they keep a fixed art style all the way through and is very rare for the book to change art style mid way through, some examples that I found of books that keep their art style, and some of the inspiration for my art style would be “the Gruffalo”, or “dear Zoo” which haven’t got the same art style as mine, but these books are really where I started to notice this factor take effect.

What do you dislike about how your final product looks?

I do not like the way that all the trees look the same and this could have been easily rectified if I had more time to actually create the book, I would have created a bigger variation of trees and this would have added a lot of variation to the scenery and would have helped a lot with how the backdrop looks and what things look like on the page. I made the tree using the shape tool and the warp tool, I then made the trunk of the tree in which I used the same technique. I actually like the look of the tree however there should have been more variation which would have been really simple to add if I just had more time on the project to create the book.

I didn’t really have a lot of time to make the character models before starting the work and putting the actual pages together, however if I had I would have created a bigger range of character models at different angles, even though there are around three different models for each pig and wolf, I would have still liked more, and if time would have allowed it I would have pretty much remade each character for each page, pretty much every other book I looked at did this, and I feel this is a big pitfall of my book that could have been made a lot better if I had more time.

Why did you include the content you used?

Every piece of content that I used in my book was used for a reason and I feel my rationale for doing different things for the design choices were warranted and I feel ended up looking really good and being nice to look at for someone who is looking at my work to critique it, or just looking at it for entertainment. For my images I really like the way they all flow together, however the characters pop out of the page, I made this happen by adding a stroke around the characters and the buildings which made them pop from the page due to this really being the only black on the page and the rest of my work being incredibly bright, however by using the dark stroke and drop shadow in places it really makes the characters pop off of the background without making the backdrops darker and keeping the characters the same level of brightness which is also another way of making characters pop off of the page. I took the idea of the simplistic but images that pop off of the backgrounds from a lot of other children’s books, which include books like “Dear Zoo”, even though the art style of this book looks drawn, you can still see a black outline around the characters on bright backgrounds. Another thing about images for the reason I used them was the backdrop, while it was the same for every page, I feel it worked really well due to the amount of assets such as trees, characters and buildings on each page making each page look different and unique, a lot of children’s books do a similar thing, using a really basic background with interesting images on it, these include “The very hungry caterpillar” and “Ten little monkeys” which both have incredibly simple backgrounds, at times being one or two colours with interesting assets in the foreground. As for fonts I didn’t really use a lot of fonts however the one that I did use was used for a good reason. I chose the font that I used throughout the book because it looked inviting to the reader and I generally liked the look of the font, however I also chose the font because it was a serif font, and while I didn’t go and look around in my research time for different children’s books that use serif fonts I imagine they do because the reason I used a serif font is because for the younger audience as serif means there is a little flick at the end of each of the letters and it is proven that this helps guide the eyes across the text making it easier to read, especially for a younger audience.

When it came to effects, I actually used a lot on my work and I feel a lot of them work really well, some didn’t, however there was good reasoning behind all of them. One of the effects that didn’t work and I didn’t realize until too late was the outer shadow around the door of the castle, while I feel it was a good idea because I wanted the castle to look like the door was pressed a little bit into the castle, I should have used an outer glow with a stroke around the door to accomplish a similar effect. The reason it really didn’t work was because I didn’t use this effect anywhere else in my work, and because of this it stood out and looked weird, however the reasoning behind doing it was correct. Something that did work well however was the colour range effect that I used to create the grass, I did this for every page, and with good reason, I really liked the way it looked and changed the boring green 1/3rd of the page, into an actual image, and gave a lot more life to the pages. I had seen this effect used in other books, but not to the same extent, usually using it to create reeds near lakes, but generally they use a fade to create the effect of ground, which I also did, however I feel the addition of colour ranged grass added a lot to the backdrop of the page. As for the colours, I made sure to keep my colour range incredibly broad and incorporated a lot of colours, however there is a consistent theme with colours all the way through my book, and that is that they are bright. There really aren’t any dull colours in my book, and if they are dull, like the brown of the wolf for example, I will generally try and make something bright on it, or incredibly near it to make sure that the wolf pulls your attention. For example, the wolf may be a dull brown, however his is wearing a checkered bright red and black coat, which is very different to everyone and everything else on the page, because of this the wolf pulls the readers attention. I felt when looking at children’s books for my research that the majority of them ended up being incredibly colourful and bright, only using shadows and black stroke to accentuate the colours and the pictures on the page, books like “Dear Zoo” Where a very big inspiration when it came to what the colour scheme was like in my book.

What signs, symbols or codes have your used in your work?

One very big thing that I put in my work was an additional meaning, I changed the ending of the book to make it instead of the wolf climbing down the chimney and dying to instead have it so the pigs are chasing the wolf away with swords. I did this because I didn’t like the original hidden meaning of the book and wanted to replace it with my own. The original meaning, or the way I interpreted it, is that things come to those who don’t do anything. In the way that the pig didn’t do a lot and the wolf eventually got fed up and made a mistake, however I don’t really like this so I changed the meaning to say you have to fight your problems head on and beat them, however I didn’t kill the wolf in my book either, because my book is also saying that your problems do have a chance of coming back, however if you stay strong it wont. There weren’t really any religious symbols in my work, however it kind of shows how the pigs came into the wolves land with nothing and then took over the wolves land and chased him out, this could be interpreted in a lot of different ways, however I feel this is interesting, because this has happened a lot in history to a lot of different countries such as America, and different times in England’s history too, where people have come over and taken over, running people out of their homes, and while they’re portrayed as the good guys, and the pigs are defending the wolf from blowing their houses down, there is actually nowhere in my book that hints that the wolf wants to eat them, he just wants them out of his home, where he was first, however this is not so obvious on first reading .

Another thing I have done in my story which is quite interesting is follow stereotypes' on colours. When you look at the pigs they are all bright and cheerful being pink, bright blue, yellow and bright green, however when you look at the wolf which has a colour scheme of brown, red and black, because of this, even if I never hinted at the wolf being the bad guy, people would automatically assume the wolf is bad and the pigs are good due to their colour schemes.

What representations can be found in your work?

Representations are very strange and warped in my book due to all of the characters in it being animals. However most of the characters are male, this being the three pigs and I guess the wolf is implied that it’s male, however there is really not a lot of evidence behind this and it could really be either gender. It doesn’t show any children at all, but there isn’t any in the three little pigs story and even if I was to put them in, I don’t really know where they’d fit into the story, or add anything at all to it. I’d say out of all of this, what my book lacks is female characters, I should have probably made one of the pigs female, and while this wouldn’t actually change anything in the book, I feel that it would have added something for the reader, especially the female readers who generally (stereotypically) like a female “hero” character more than a male, especially when the audience members are younger. As for races and social groups, races aren’t really shown in my work unless you count a pig as a race , but there really aren’t any stereotypes shown for any kind of race, non of the characters do anything stereotypical of anything and are quite plain when it comes to character traits in this region, and as for social groups, I guess the pigs display belongers and are very happy with where they are, and are scared of change, while the wolf is trying to destroy their houses, this is scary for them as they are losing their property, something that they built themselves.

What style have you employed in your products?

The type of visual style I chose in product was pretty unique, it’s a cartoony design, however all of the characters look like they are popping off of the page, I did this due to my book being targeted at a younger audience so the characters popping off of the page, mixed with the really bright colours of the background and the stroke and drop shadow of the characters creates an interesting and entertaining style which is cartoony, but different to anything else out there. While there are other books the inspired and helped my book grow as a project, I feel that it is overall unique enough to call it it’s own product and it’s not really copying anything, or anyone else on the market due to it’s unique story ending to the three little pigs in which the wolf doesn’t die, he gets chased away instead. There are a lot of existing productshowever that implement similar techniques in it’s post production, however non of them end up looking quite like my work, for example, the book “Dear Zoo” has a similar effect where it uses stroke around the characters and assets such as buildings to make the characters pop out, however this is more of a drawn style, while my style looks more animated. And while Dear Zoo was a very big influence on my work, maybe the biggest for the style, it doesn’t really look anything like my project and has clear differences throughout with Dear Zoo having a more drawn art style when compared to mine, which is obviously done in Photoshop.

What were the weaknesses of the pre-production

My pre-production didn’t have a lot of weaknesses, however one of the things I feel could have been improved would be the mood board, I feel when looking back I probably should have done multiple ones, one for each character and one for all of scenery and building, My main problem when I was in pre production was creating a clear idea, and knowing exactly what I wanted to do and it wasn’t until my test page where I really knew what I wanted to do, so up to then my design changed quite a lot through my pre-production. I feel if I had put some extra work into my mood boards and allocated my time better, I would have had a clearer image of what I wanted to do earlier into the project and I feel this would have helped me out a lot and given me more time to actually do work, instead of spending time thinking about how to do it, and what I wanted to do for my actual work.

Another weakness of my pre production is in the spider diagrams, I feel I could have done a lot better generating more ideas especially for the headings such as age range and characters where I don’t think I put enough information about the ideas I generated, and I think I could have generated more ideas in general. I feel if I had managed my time a little bit better I would have had more time to go and do more on the mind maps and this would have helped me out a lot once I got further into the work due to having more idea generation and having clearer ideas and having to think less when it actually came to the work.

What were the strengths of the pre-production

I feel that there where some really good strengths in my pre-production, one being the digital flat plans and how they lead to me creating the basic layout for my 10/11 pages of my book when combined with my storyboard. I felt that this was the second big step to me realizing what I wanted to and a good layout for it (after actually choosing and getting some basic ideas for my characters themselves). After I created these it gave me a really good idea for what I wanted to do and because of this I feel it was one of the strongest parts of my work, It also made back up a lot of the time that I lost thinking about what to do as from this point I didn’t have to think too much about the work that I was doing for the actual book due to knowing, and having clear ideas of what I wanted to do for the characters, scenery and backdrop.

Another thing that I feel is strong about my pre-production was my proposal as a whole, I feel that the work that I put into this piece of work really shows and then continues to show the further you read into it. It also says a lot and shows a lot about when I was starting to get my ideas together and when I decided on my art style because once I did I pretty much stuck to that art style until I had finished my book and was very happy with it and still am. Another reason why I think this part of my pre- production was a strength is because of the way that I managed my time through it, I really feel like i did well there, completing the work with a lot of time to spare which allowed me to have a good amount of time before the allotted time for production to start working on my assets for the book.

What were the weaknesses of planning

The first weakness that I found from my planning wasn't so much the actual planning, but what I had to do after it, when typing out my schedule I didn't really take into account the fact that some things would take a long time to do, some pages of my book, and some things would take no time at all. Because of this what ended up happening is that I didn't really follow the schedule exactly, and even though it had a lot of information and was a good piece of work I feel I could have made it even better just by thinking about this before writing it out.

Another thing that I found that was a weakness in my planning is the amount of health and safety ideas I came up with and the solutions to the problems in general. I feel there was a few more health and safety things I could have written down, especially concerning healthy eating while spending a lot of time on the computer and making sure to keep a tight schedule as this makes you work more efficiently, however the rest of it is fine apart from the solutions where I feel I could have given more information and multiple ways to solve the problems, like for back problems, you could also just make sure to sit in your chair correctly, or get a standing desk to work.

What were the strengths of the planning

The first weakness that I found from my planning wasn't so much the actual planning, but what I had to do after it, when typing out my schedule I didn't really take into account the fact that some things would take a long time to do, some pages of my book, and some things would take no time at all. Because of this what ended up happening is that I didn't really follow the schedule exactly, and even though it had a lot of information and was a good piece of work I feel I could have made it even better just by thinking about this before writing it out.

Another strength about the planning was the health and safety issues. What I thought was strong about these is actually how much they helped me and brought things to my attention and things for me to do I otherwise wouldn't have done. I made sure too follow all of my safety issues and use the solutions I came up with them to keep myself healthy throughout the creation of the book. I feel if I hadn't done this I would have had a lot of trouble completing the book in the time allotted to me.

Historical and cultural context

My book is similar in certain ways to other books. The main way that it is similar to other books is the storyline

itself. The storyline I chose to use in my book is that of the three little pigs which is a story line that has been used for many years and I imagine will be used again for many more. There are many renditions of the three little pigs that come in book and movie forms however after researching and looking up differently created three little pigs media there is really no other movie or book in which the wolf at the end gets ran off with swords. This makes my rendition unique and adds my own twist to the story line in which no one else has. The product I took the most inspiration from visually however was not a three little pigs book it was a children's book called "dear zoo", the reason I credit this book with giving me the most inspiration is because of the stroke on the edge of the characters in the book, this gave me the idea to put a stoke on my characters to stick out. I also took inspiration from Disney's movie "The Three Little Pigs" for humanizing my pigs and this was very useful when creating my book and designing the characters in my book. For the wolf I didn't really have any inspiration from anywhere I just made something that I liked the look of and that resembled a humanized wolf, non of the wolves from pastrenditions of this book have really looked like my wolf, when you look at the wolf from the Disney rendition of the three little pigs it was a lot taller and skinnier, while my wolf is short and fat which shows the distinct differences between the two pieces of media.

Peer Feedback

• Summarise peer feedback and discuss– Responses you agree with– Responses you disagree with