When asked to “express my individuality” I automatically knew I had to embrace my unlucky trait. While I have seemingly endless stories of being unlucky I chose to tell the story of how my fourth-grade teacher never made me a popsicle stick and proceeded to pull out the entire classes’ sticks, never realizing he never pulled mine. Although some would see being unlucky as a problem and would allow it to get their spirits down, I do not. Over the years I have learned that it is just something that is common in my life. Since being unlucky is my reality I choose to face it with humor. This was what inspired my step 1 from Scott McCloud’s Six Steps from Chapter 7. I would embrace my popsicle story, but with humor. 

As I was planning my comic out in step 2 I decided to construct my comic vertically, instead of the previous 2 weekly comics in which I designed horizontally. This allowed me to compose my comic in a different way to try something new, and I had to revert from what I had been practicing all along. Step 3’s Idioms are prevalent in my comic as I used a four-leaf clover to represent “luckiness.” In the second panel, a peer has found a four-leaf clover, a symbol of luckiness; however my character is seen holding a two-leaf clover, nothing near as lucky as a four-leafed one would have been. A clear structure for step 4 also is shown. I created these sequences of panels to be easy to read since it was a story about my time in fourth-grade. 

The craft of step 5 was something I knew I wanted to work a lot on in this comic. The past two comics I had done featured characters that looked quite simple and similar. This comic I wanted to create characters that looked completely different. Truthfully, this is where I spent most of my time on this project. Before I had only ever done one human character, this time I was getting ambitious and doing three. I took my time and fully designed my character at first, and hated it. It looked way too similar to everything I had previously done and I was not happy with it. So after watching a couple of videos and completing some google searches of “people made with Illustrator” I was finally able to come up with a style of character I truly loved. I then applied this same style to finishing the two final characters. In addition to a new style of characters, I wanted to try shading for my final comic. While I knew I wanted to keep with my flat style I wanted more depth to the images. I was able to achieve this look by using the shape builder tool, which has quickly become my newest favorite tool on Illustrator.