You have been asked to produce an illustrated strip of up to five frames for use in schools explaining to young teenagers how to cope with the onset of puberty. You can decide on which aspect you want to tackle. Due to the subject matter and the intended age group, it is suggested that you use metaphor and humour when conveying the message – though take care not to trivialise a serious message. The client would also like you to provide a single illustration of your character for use on the front cover.

The leaflet is called What’s happening to my body? It’s all going mad!

You will probably find thumbnailing very useful here to work out how each frame will relate to the others. You need to submit all stages of the development process – thumbnails, visuals and client visuals for the cartoon strip and the stand-alone illustration.

OCA Key Steps in Illustration

This was an exercise that I was dreading as soon as I initially read it. I felt like it might be quite a challenging topic to handle in an illustration without making it either look silly or all wrong. Putting this thought aside I jumped into the research for this project.

One thing that instantly came to mind was Big Mouth on Netflix. This cartoon series is all about this topic and while it is often quite to the point, I find is super funny so I will try to take a page out of their book and make this educational strip slightly wrong and try to play on the funny side of things.

I really liked how the characters are all very awkward teenagers and the show is super unapologetic about all the issues they face as they are going through biological and emotional change. I wanted to capture the awkwardness of this change in my illustrations as well.

I jumped into the red search stage to get all the facts right, and found a useful link:

https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/sexual-health/stages-of-puberty-what-happens-to-boys-and-girls/

I’ve gathered out the below list of changes:

Girls:

• Breasts starting to grow
• Pubic hair starts to grow
• First period
• Underarm hair begins to grow
• Start to sweat more
• Acne
• Hips grow rounder and waist get narrower
• Mood changes
• Growth spurt

Boys:

• Penis and testicles get bigger
• Pubic hair starts to develop
• Underarm hair starts to grow
• Start to sweat more
• Acne
• Voice breaks
• Wet dreams
• Mood changes
• Growth spurt

This was a useful starting point I think to begin thinking about how I wanted to approach the illustration. I think I would like to create a sort of comic that goes through all these changes and highlights them and the fact that they are all normal. I would also like to unify wherever possible, because I think this is the age where the sexes begin to grow apart and it can be important to show that some of the changes they are going through might be affecting the other sex too. I highlighted all the mutual changes in the lists above.

I went for it and filled the page with complaining teenagers. I think this would be a pretty good starting point and I think I managed to cover most of the changes, but I didn’t really have a conclusion of any sorts on the page. I don’t know if this is the right approach. I was thinking that this would be helpful though because if a teen seen this with all the different characters, they would realise that all of their peers are having similar issues and would probably bridge the gap when it comes to talking about it.

I wanted to make this a 2 pager plus I will create a cover and a back page that would be an information leaflet basically, so that all the changes that are shown in the leaflet are explained at the back. This would mean that the leaflet is 4 pages long, I can imagine this could work as an A4 folded in half to create a A5 leaflet.

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I thought they started out pretty diverse and humorous, so I liked it, although still wasn’t 100% about my approach. I decided to take this to completion and assess how all the pieces come together.

I wanted to try this out with some fonts and see if I can find some that work. I decided to use “Pop of the Tops” as I think this looks cool and has that doodle-y feel. I shared this with some friends for feedback and they liked it, so I decided to colour it in and place the text to seee if the idea works as a whole.

I started to like the outcome now. I think the colours work pretty well and I feel that it is roughly have the feel that I wanted it to have… Rough hand-drawn characters and quirky text. I didn’t go too rude or too scientific with the text which was my aim. I wanted this to be easy and fun to read.

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I had some different variations for the cover and ultimately decided to go with number 3. I thought that the uncertain attitude of the character works quite well to pose the question.

I wanted the typography to be awkward and kind of crazy to reflect the confused state of a teenager when they go through this phase of their life. I think it turned out suitably uncomfortable.

Next I wanted to create my back page which will be talking about hormones and all the facts that make all these changes happen. I wanted this to be simple and informative, so I think I will try to use a bit calmer type and just make this tie in with the rest of the publication.

I made this page blue to make it calmer and I would include some educational text that will explain to teenagers why is puberty happening and basically draw a conclusion to the whole piece.

I went ahead and created a mockup with my final images.

I couldn’t find a mockup that was an A4 paper folded in half so I went with a magazine mockup that I had on file. I think it illustrates the idea well.

Reflection

I feel like the piece overall fulfils the brief. It was not a topic that I was super inspired to create illustrations for, but I think the end product is pretty charming and gets the point that I wanted to communicate through. I was struggling to make the characters very different from each other, for example the guy that is popping into the scene is a little unoriginal when used 3 times total. I feel like this is a project that you could spend days on and still not be happy with it because the sheer amount of different illustrations you need to create for it. Ideally I would like to have created some sort of illustration for the back that was covering how hormones work, but I wanted to limit the time spent on this exercise and this is how much I managed to squeeze out in about 15 hours total.

Overall, I think I am happy with the outcome.