To make this concept from the book into some form of media, I decided to create a motivational poster. I figured these would have been everywhere, for the makers of the “vaccine” to have a chance  to scare the most people out of their money.

I got the background picture from Unsplash courtesy of Benjamin Davies. I also happily got to use Canva again. Playing around with the words to make them legible was the hardest part. That and coming up with the exact wording for the “ask your doctor” part at the bottom. I wanted to be true to the company that advertised Phalanx, in how they never outright said they could cure the virus that turned people into zombies.

For this assignment, I had to use the cool letters website to get inspiration for writing my name. I instead used my character’s name, since after a while my own name started to look too weird to continue.

The first Charlee represents her collected-yet-still-getting-the-ropes nature. Next is her bolder side, underneath her exterior. The “A” in the second Charlee was a happy accident in the making of the image. Before I did the blue background, I noticed the A was much lighter than the other letters and chose to work it into my drawing. There is no real significance to it, though I do like the accidental effects it gives. The letter looks further away than the others, it is the major component of the stressed syllable in the name, the lightening of the weight of the text overall, etc. The complicated, multi-faceted manner of the ways her name is written attempt to show just how much has yet to be revealed about Charlee Faraday.

Charlee Faraday, featured above in her own issue of Charlee Magazine.

I decided a great post to add to the building of my character, Charlee Faraday, would be to do the assignment “We’ve Got You Covered.” I used Canva for this assignment, finding a template magazine cover and altering it to my liking. Figuring out all the article titles took longer than formatting the cover itself! I tried to bring her personality in on each of the article titles and taglines, including the phrase “Where there is smoke, there is fire.” This phrase was part of the template I used on Canva, but it describes Charlee’s rational thinking to a T. I wish I could have gone the extra mile and written actual articles to go along with the cover, but I sadly didn’t have the time.

I wanted to have a real face to associate with Charlee, so when I made her introductory post I inserted the best representation of her I could find. Wanting to have a different picture of the same woman, I dug into the photograph I had on my Pintrest to find the model. I found out her name is Aiyana A. Lewis (linked is her instagram account). The picture for my magazine cover matched my view of Charlee perfectly: dressed casually and comfortably and looking contently uninterested. She is okay just watching and not interacting with much of her environment. It’s not that she isn’t interested per say, rather she cares more for thinking on than acting with the world around her.

And here is my cover:

I tried making my version less gritty (except for the Earth) and more modern, since much of the book looks retrospectively at the past events. I also brought in the human/zombie element along with the worldwide breadth of the pandemic.

The dark background has a subtle swirling pattern that isn’t blatant but, when noticed, adds depth and dimension to the cover. I decided to sandwich the title’s text with the author and subtitle texts’ to make the title more obvious (besides its already larger size). I used Canva to create this cover and found the process to be simple for the most part. The only frustrating thing was how slow it was for me to select different elements. I am not sure if it was my computer’s fault or just the site (or some combination of both).

Charlee is seen here at the art and hobby store at which she works. She doesn’t necessarily love working there, but she likes her coworkers and gets a lot of hours so she sticks with it.

The store here is one that I have back home, called Paper Source. It has everything from traditional cards and patterned paper to interactive books and even toys. Making Charlee on Hero Machine was so fun that I could have played around on the maker for actual hours. The most disappointing thing was that none of the short hair worked to be close to what Charlee’s hair looks like (as in her hair is curly and hardly any of the provided styles were curly). Also, I originally chose one of the preset body types, but then I saw none of the clothing lined up unless I were to move everything on individually and I had already spent a loong time on this so I wasn’t about to take even more time.