Illustrator is one of the first programs I learned how to use in the Creative Cloud a year ago and so I feel like I can work it fairly well. Since the whole quarantine thing has been happening, I’ve been watching a lot of anime and my inspiration was watching all of Haikyu!! so I made my version and interpretation of short little cut scenes that are in the show. 

I introduce the comic with clean lies — as best as I could, at least — and try to evoke a sense of seriousness, focus, and concentration with the first two panels. The next one has the same line work style, but I muted the colors a bit to lead into the last two panels. The last two panels are only in black, grey, and white with more sketch-like lines to try to create more stress and an anxiousness. 

I used the geometric tool to make the panels only. A large part of this was create with the paintbrush tool. A few times I did use the pen tool to get extremely straight lines that also needed to bend into a curve (the eyebrows, specifically, in the second panel). While I do know how to use Illustrator and I’ve used it the most, I tend to stick with the pen and curvature tools and work exclusively with geometric shapes. By mostly using the paintbrush tool, I think it allowed more of a smooth and free-flowing style that I wanted than the geometric tools would have. 

My experience in Illustrator is making logos or flat designs, any digital-freehand drawing I use Photoshop and so it was a new experience to have to make a comic in Illustrator instead. I think this program is a little more forgiving because it sort of cleans up the line-work and smooths things out — but it also allows you to change that setting a bit — and it does take a bit of finessing to get exactly what you want sometimes.