The Mongrel and her Mutt

Academic (2025)

For this project I was assigned to read the Aesop’s fairytale “The Dog and its Reflection” and made a three page comic, with a cover, based off of it. In the story, the dog has a piece of meat but when he sees his reflection in a river, he thinks that it’s a different dog with a bigger piece of meat, and when he goes to bark at the dog, he loses his meat in the river. The story’s message is to not be greedy or ungrateful, or else you’ll lose what you already have. I wanted to get away from the story’s original subject matter as much as I could whilst keeping the theme. The idea I ended up with was a mother trying to change or improve her daughter, by repeatedly criticizing her , ends up losing her only daughter.

I started with character designs, since I knew that I would have at least two repeating characters. In designing these two, it helped me decide on a more official color palette. The mother has warm colors with a green accent while the daughter’s main color is blue with an accent of yellow. I wanted the comic to start with the warm tones and slowly progress into a mostly blue color palette to symbolize the shift in control over the daughter’s life. After the basic planning, I sketched where I wanted all my panels to be and then tried to recreate it as closely as possible in Photoshop, as well as Abode Illustrator for the logo and typography on the cover page and other type.