This project is the first 8 pages of the comic book I started. The overarching message of Iltopia is to show children of color in a realistic struggle to aspire to be something great. This is in spite of the adversity life presents them. In this day and age, with the advancements of technology and social media, Black children are seeing the horrors of the world more frequently and unfiltered. It ultimately led me to ask how Black kids are expected to live successful and fulfilling lives when Cops are killing their kin, mainstream media is demeaning Black culture, and pop culture is discrediting the Black struggle.
The process in making this was first drafting the sroty in Adobe Story CC. Once the dialogue and visual were written out, then I began to sketch the panels out in my sketchbook. I scanned the rough drafts and imported them in to Photoshop. For the foreground characters, I did the line work in Adobe Illustrator because I wanted to clean vector lines to compliment the organic lines of the background. The coloring was done in photoshop. After the pages were done, I imported them all into Adobe Indesign. I made the cover by combining an illustration with copic markers for the front cover with a sticker design I drew in Illustrator and colored in photoshop for the back cover. Everything was then exported out as a pdf using Adobe Indesign.
Adventures in Iltopia
I was awarded the Adobe Design Achievement Awards 2016 Illustration Semifinalist.
