At the beginning of the project, I connected with author Kirsten Deall through Trello to discuss the storyline. After receiving the draft, I prepared a dummy layout with digital sketches of how each scene would be composed. Once the layouts were approved I moved on to character design.
From the initial sketches, I further developed the design of the whales and crab individually and with backgrounds. Kirsten was interested in incorporating images of real plastic in the illustrations that showed plastic dumping. I tested this concept with the crab scene - this page shows the massive amount of plastic that Phantom ingested.
Once character designs were approved, I finished illustrating the spreads in this style. To make edits easier to complete, I vectorized all the scenes in illustrator and added textural effects in photoshop.
The following are a selection of pages from the final version of Phantom: A Tale on Plastic Pollution.
The prototype for Phantom was displayed at the Senior Capstone Presentation for Bachelor of Fine Arts candidates at Union University.