The Art of Visual Storytelling:
Crafting Conceptual Narratives in Editorial Illustration
with Sunnu Rebecca Choi

25/10/2024

This semester, I attended The Art of Visual Storytelling workshop, and I found it incredibly engaging. The course is designed to help students transform textual content into compelling visuals. Through activities like vocabulary association, concept development, and visual composition, we learn to interpret and understand text from different perspectives, creating images that enhance the narrative. In class, we use materials provided by the course, such as circle stickers, newspaper clippings, colored paper, and pencils.

The first part of each lesson involves selecting a random sentence and brainstorming key words. The teacher then distributes black circle stickers of various sizes, which we use to build a visual representation based on these keywords.We combined the shapes and continued to associate them, finding material from newspapers to create on A4 paper.

This is a Sudoku puzzle I cut out from a newspaper. Sudoku is a game that requires constant deduction and a strong sense of logic, with each number carefully placed according to a specific reasoning. Every Sudoku puzzle has a single correct solution. However, I deconstructed a Sudoku puzzle and randomly rearranged the pieces on paper, creating a puzzle without logic, one that can never have a correct answer. Through this, I aim to express the idea that creativity should be free and unbound.

In the second part of the class, we randomly select an article and create visual narratives inspired by its content, using the materials provided. The article I drew was about egg freezing. After reading it, I identified key words within the text, which I then used—either by connecting them into a narrative or highlighting them individually—to guide my creative process.In this project, I explored how textual and visual elements interact. Starting with text as the foundation, I experimented with various visuals, using them as symbols and textures to complement the narrative. By combining words and images, I aimed to create a layered composition that enhances the story’s meaning and adds depth. This process allowed me to examine the relationship between text and image, and how they can work together to produce a more immersive and nuanced expression.

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