My project “Grown Woman” is about the role, the responsibilities and the challenges of being a grown woman. I use myself as a model for study, finding familiar situations, but without being autobiographical. I use visual storytelling for researching this topic, trying to visualize a selection of situations and thereby telling the story of being this particular grown up.

Up to now, I have been working as an illustrator, doing a lot of animation as well. For this project I wanted to tell the story through comics, but it ended up being a mix between a graphic novel, a picture book, a flip book and comics, being more like a series of stills from an animation.

In my master thesis I try to think through the choices of this project, trying to reflect on the choices, how they worked out in the process of making this booklet as my final piece of work. Also I try to reflect on the project as a research process. It is a complex process with lots of sidetracks, failures, surprises and luck. It is not perfect. It could have been better and different. This text is about how, what and why it became the way it did and why the process ended where it ended. Under my presentation there were a lot of people who were moved and touched by this story and this figure, and it surprised me that many felt a familiarity and a resemblance to themselves in it.