1 Dustin: This crawlway is pretty claustrophobic.
2 Dustin: It’s really cramped. We could get stuck.
3 Dustin: Imagine if our flashlights stopped working.
4 Lucas: Imagine if you shut up and we could just get on with it!

I wrote and took the photos for this strip before I had any real idea how I'd visually convey the idea that they were crawling through a tight tunnel.

To get a tunnel image, I used the AI art program DALL-E to generate one. Well, to generate several, and I chose the best looking ones. Interestingly, no matter what I included in the text prompt for the artwork, such as specifying a view of the tunnel at a "3/4 angle" or an "oblique angle", it always generated a view looking almost straight down a tunnel, with symmetrical or near-symmetrical sides on the left and right. (This goes to show some of the severe limitations of current AI art generation algorithms.)

Since I photographed the figures from an angle, this wouldn't do. I solved the problem by flipping a couple of the generated tunnel images on their side, and pretending the wall was the floor!

Here are the original images that DALL-E generated. The first one I rotated 90° anticlockwise and used as the background of panels 1 to 3:

The second one I used DALL-E to extend further to the right from the original square output, then rotated 90° anticlockwise and used as the background of panel 4:

I also edited the images' brightness and colour balance to simulate a dimly lit tunnel. AI generated art is very useful for things like this, but you still need to work at it, to manually adjust things and make them usable.

On another note, I don't have a particularly crippling fear, but cramped spaces is one thing that does freak me out a little. I enjoy visiting caves set up for tourists, but I would never go caving in any way that involves crawling through a narrow space.