For my mentorship project, I am fortunate to have IDEA alumni Susan Li as my mentor, she currently works at IUGO games. I decided to expand on a project I started in one of my previous classes, Portfolio Bootcamp with Dominic Prevost. The project revolves around a story titled “Re-Fracture”, I have plans of publishing the story as a webcomic on a platform called Webtoons. The plot revolves around four characters and it’s essentially an amalgamation of story elements I have loved in other series such as elemental magic, legendary weapons, a rivals-to-friends-to-lovers trope, and much more.
In Dominic’s class, I began working on character designs for the story’s four protagonists. Since I already did character designs, I wanted to have a clearer vision of the world these characters exist in.
I rarely create backgrounds for most of my pieces and I know that I can’t keep avoiding them forever. This project is the perfect opportunity to tackle that fear and become more accustomed to drawing backgrounds and really elevate my illustrations. Susan also creates background environments at her current job, so I knew she would be able to give me insightful feedback on my work.
To stay on track but still have a good chunk of work to do, Susan and I decided that one background would be fully rendered, and four additional backgrounds would be tightly sketched. While I still feel hesitant about actually having to draw backgrounds, I’m up to the challenge and excited to continue fleshing out “Re-Fracture”.
For this phase of the project I would give myself a 9/10. Since I already had previous assets to expand on, it was easy to come up with a project plan and present my idea to Susan.