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Journal Post 10: My Evolving Process

My semester of comics has finally come to an end. It was a struggle at times, but I believe the things I’ve learned in this class about the comic genre will come to use at some point in my future, especially in my future career.

I’ve come a long way since the first time I reflected on my comics. I’m no longer ashamed of my drawing, I’m not afraid to try something new, and I don't put myself down as much when something doesn't come out exactly right. I have embraced the process of comic drawing and I think that’s really valuable.

I decided to try using color in the adaptation project. I’m glad I did that--I tried something new without really knowing how it would come out--but for now, with the final project, I want to stick with black ink and pursue new strategies with black and white.

Between the adaptation project and now I have also been able to accept the way I draw my characters. Being able to workshop with other people in class and seeing their character sketches made me realize that not everyone is a perfect drawer, and a funny looking character doesn’t affect how great a story can be. This will help me when I finalize my project as I will focus less on how my characters look and more on the overall comic, such as the page arrangement and transitions and the overall style. 

I’m so happy with what I’ve learned and how much I’ve grown throughout this course. Not only have I learned about stylistic decisions in comics and the genre overall, I’ve learned about how society views comics and other ways in which our society uses comics. More than anything I think I’ve evolved by realizing the possibilities that comics propose in so many different situations. As I mentioned before, I’m almost positive I will use some sort of comic format in my career in Advertising/Marketing/Public Relations (I clearly don’t know exactly what I want to do with my life yet). I’m excited for what I will do in the future and anxious to see how comics will pop into my life from time to time. 

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Journal Post 9: Things I've Learned/ Things to Steal This is the page in the very beginning of Julio's Day, before the story begins. I chose this page as my "things to steal" because it has taught me a lot about how I can depict my characters and illustrations. I know my final comic is going to be in black and white, and I've known that ever since I finished the adaptation project and realized I was not good with using colored pencils. So, since then, I've looked towards Hernandez's illustrations and the way he depicts his characters in Julio's Day, since it is in all black and white. My biggest issue with character drawing is that all of my girls look the same and all of my guys look the same. All of my babies look the same and, to be honest I don't really know how to draw an old person. So I look to this page for some inspiration. There are many characters in this comic, and Hernandez is able to make each one look unique. He uses the eyes, eyebrows, hair, facial hair and freckles/ wrinkles to depict between characters. Most of their mouths and noses are the same, but he does a great job of making those unique features of each character prominent. This is uplifting for me because I know I'm not going to be able to draw a bunch of different noses, so I'll just use other features to characterize the illustrations. The way he depicts hair color is also something I can learn from. Using black ink, it's hard for me to draw a character with blonde hair. Tommy and I think one other character in the comic have blonde hair, and he portrayed this by drawing the outline of the hair line, and then using a few small, quick lines in the hair to show depth. I'm interested to practice the different hair colors and styles in my comic because I know they are huge factors in making my characters unique.

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Questions/Answers from in class workshops. The top half are the questions and the bottom half are the answers/ideas that came from my classmates. Because my idea for a comic was still forming, my questions weren't too specific. However, I think my classmates helped me in determining how I should start my comic and collect my ideas and who my audience should be.

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Journal Post 8: Possibilities for Final Project

The final project for this class is coming in hot, so it’s time for me to do a little brainstorming on ideas and themes for my comic. In class, my professor gave us a few categories to try to jump-start our ideas. One of those categories was ‘things I care about’. It was hard for me to configure my thoughts in class but now I think I have a start. Something I care about is being able to be myself. On a larger scale, I realized one thing I get annoyed with in today’s society is how a lot of people are judged or put down for being themselves. This is a very general idea and I can take many routes in this category with my comic. I could talk about gender equality and equal pay, equality of the LGBTQ+ community, equality of people of different races, etc. However, I think I would like to try something a little more close to me. I care so much about being able to be myself because growing up I was the girl that was never consistent with social norms or gender norms (I played sports, played the drums, hated makeup, etc.) but because I was surrounded by such incredible and uplifting people throughout my life, I never felt like I should be anyone but myself. I know there are a lot of people out there that do not want to be themselves, so I’m thinking my comic can be a story for them? 

I guess my comic would follow the same theme as Ms. Marvel, with the story of overcoming judgements and doubts. However, I would like my audience to be of people my age. College or high school students that are more aware that social norms exist and that understand how someone could feel put down by them.

My ideas are brief, I know. It definitely is tricky to think of how to adapt my life into a comic without exactly adapting my entire life, ya know? All I know is I want to follow the theme of being true to yourself. I have found recently in my life that when I am embrace myself for who I truly am, I am so extremely happy. I also feel like when I am truly myself my life around me is just better. I want to try to communicate that into a comic for an audience that may feel wary about being themselves for whatever reason.

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Journal Post 7: Things I've Learned/ Things to Steal There are many fantastic rhetorical choices Guibert makes with his art in The Photographer. This is just one of the pages that show off his talent in evoking emotion and using closure. First, I loved how he chose to depict the darkness. Guibert acrually depicts darkness in multiple ways through out the comic, such as using black and blue, and different shades of brown with black. This page shows the darkness by making Didier and the horse a silhouette. The background is a gray/blue color that represents the heavy, almost encompassing amounts of snow. I loved how he also showed it was snowing by depicting the snow flurries on the silhouettes. The page arrangement and panel transitions are also rhetorically effective. The page is 12 small panels, all showcasing Didier lost in the dark snow, beating his horse, and then realizing he was going slightly crazy. It's a suspenseful moment that moves quickly. The small panels and the very minimal dialogue/captions makes you read through the panels quickly. Guibert did a great job of utilizing closure with his illustrations. You can't see Didier's face at all. But Guibert illustrated his body well enough that we can understand what's going on and even feel the emotion behind it. Didier raising his hands in a cry for help, his fist going towards the horse, and then his fall to his knees all show how Guibert relied on closure to tell this part of the story.

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Journal Post 6: My Evolving Process

Weeks ago I discussed the technical aspect of my comic drawing as well as my overall process of drawing a comic. I wanted to reflect on that again since I’ve experienced many different forms of comics since then.

So since my last posting on the topic, I’ve actually used colored pencil. Before I was strictly pen. Then I decided to start with pencil then go over it with the pen. My adaptation project was the first time I used color in my comics. I drove all the way to Walgreens to snag a big 50-pack of colored pencils. Having all of those colors at my disposal gave me even more possibilities for drawing the comic a certain way. The color of a comic has a huge affect on the tone, mood, and overall message of the comic. So, it was nerve-wracking for me to have that extra responsibility.

I don’t have a specific drafting method as far as my comic drawing process goes. I’ve noticed some habits that I have, like starting with one or two fresh sheets of plain white paper and the sketchpad that the finished comic will go on. I used the plain printer paper to draw my characters or images out. They all end up looking pretty much the same, but I think I use the printer paper to practice the movements of the drawing before I do It on the sketchpad. 

Something I have not really improved on is how long it takes me to draw. Whenever I try to speed things up or kind of just draw without a thought (hoping it just comes naturally), it ends up turning out not too pretty. However, I have learned that not every single drawing has to be pristine. I’ve embraced tiny flaws, for example maybe in a character’s facial features. Sometimes leaving a too big of a nose or mis shaped eyes adds a little character to the comic.

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Journal Post 5: My Evolving Process

So, I just turned in the Adaptation Project. I feel relieved and exhausted, but I’m proud that I made it to this point in the semester. The way I felt creating this project was very different from how I feel when creating the low-stakes discovery tasks. I definitely felt more pressure to make this project superb and profound. I think that’s what set me back a bit in the process. I was so focused on making this huge, profound, legendary adaptation that I didn’t give myself enough leeway to get creative and have fun with it.

I spent a lot more time in the brainstorming process which at first made me anxious. With the discovery tasks, I’m so used to sitting down, reading the task, thinking about what to draw, scribbling a bit to practice, then drawing the comic. With the adaptation project, the first two or three of my “sitting down and thinking about it” sessions didn’t include any drawing that made the final cut. I went back and forth many times deciding what to draw and how to draw it. I think overall I definitely felt more stifled than motivated with this project. I felt like I scratched ideas more than thinking they could work. I think one of the reasons I lacked the motivation was because I didn’t like the completed adaptation list. There were options of all sorts and from many different genres, but I just felt like I couldn’t visualize an adaptation for almost all of them. 

Now onto the more positive results from the adaptation! With this project I did try to use new strategies I hadn’t attempted before. First, I did it in color. I hadn’t used color in any of my previous comics and it was definitely a different animal to tackle. However, I thought it brought something new and was definitely important for an adaptation of such a colorful song. I also attempted new page arrangements such as using one big panel on top, followed by three panels in the middle, and one big one on bottom. I think trying new page arrangement opened me up to the possibilities a page can have in the future.

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Journal Posting 4: Possibilities for the Adaptation Project

As the Adaptation Project is due in four days, I have already chosen what I will adapt into a comic. I decided to adapt Chance the Rapper’s song called Sunday Candy. It was extremely hard for me to pick something to adapt from the list of texts to choose from. I originally started to adapt the poem The More Loving One, but found myself running dry of creative and unique ideas. When I started to look into Sunday Candy, my mind started to overflow with different ideas and concepts I could pursue to adapt the song.

I love the song. It’s happy, upbeat, and has a different musical style than most rappers’ songs, something that Chance accomplishes with all of his music. I think the song is best described as colorful. The horns, the piano, and the literal mention of “candy” puts so much colorful imagery in my mind, so I’m going to try to make the comic as colorful as possible, which is something I have yet to attempt in my comics. My main goal for this comic is to adapt the song into a love-story comic. I want to depict the complete joy of a relationship, the wanting to be with that significant other all the time, the kind of relationship that makes you praise God for how lucky you are. And I think one of the best ways to represent love is with color.

The audience of the song and the audience for this comic are young adults, and more specifically, young lovers. People in love for the first time, and people that understand the feeling of giving yourself to someone. Perhaps even people that have found God through someone else. I don’t want to make church and God the focus of the comic, and although I know Chance is a believer of God, I don’t think the song was intended as a gospel hymn. The hook, “I’ve been waiting for you for the whole week...you’re my Sunday Candy” to me is more about missing someone or loving someone so much that you can’t wait to see them, so that is what I will try to depict in the comic.

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A map comic.

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A travel comic. For this one I drew an exotic location known as the UCF intramural baseball field. I just recently started playing IM softball and I had never seen the fields before. I think an outsider would clearly understand that the comic is a baseball field but it was hard for me to specify it as the UCF baseball field. I think the three panels I drew accurately portrayed the essence of the field. There's a scoreboard in right field that you can see from the parking lot. There's the dugout view. And then there's the field view. There's a lot missing from the IM field that brings a real baseball field to life: concession stands, mascots, Dippin' Dots. There wasn't even anyone in the bleachers watching the game. So I think my lack of color and three simple panels accurately depicts the mood at the field. However, I feel like my lack of color doesn't accurately depict my feeling as I was at the field. I was full of life, nostalgic and nervous. I hadn't played ball since I was a kid. But the bright lights and red clay made me feel like a happy little athlete again. I used a strategy of criss-crossed lines to work as a fence and then tried to draw something that was beyond the fence--the field. For my first try I think it worked. I learned I have to make sure my fence was light enough to be able to see the field while also making sure the bases weren't so dark that they looked like they were in front of the fence. So I guess for an outsider, someone who has never experienced a ball field whether it was watching or playing a game, the comic accurately depicts what the field looks like--pretty meh. But for me, and for anyone else who has played or has memories on the field, I could have used some color in a way to show the excitement of the game. I'm definitely buying a pack of colored markers this week.

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A conversation comic. The art work is still pretty brutal, but that's okay. I experimented a little with the panels and used some ideas from "Wally Wood's 22 Panels That Always Work", including the big head in the third panel, the extreme close up in the fourth, and the silhouettes in the fifth. I think this comic made this simple conversation a little less boring.

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A year in a page. This nine-panel comic is a depiction of my 2016. Although a lot happened in my life during those 12 months, I decided to depict a relationship where my fondest memories of 2016 reside. I'm very pleased with how my first attempt at a nine-panel comic turned out. I tried to depict the nighttime frequently to show a passing of time. I also was more adventurous with my panels this time around. The fifth and eighth panel are depicted from my point of view. I figured the other panels that showed showed different scenes of my life were getting a little boring, so I used a different point of view to change up the pace. I also tried to do something with the fifth and sixth panels. I illustrated myself talking to him in the sixth panel from the fifth panel. However, I still tried to depict a progression of time. My late-night studying while he distracted me was a recurring situation among many nights. I tried to depict that by having the nighttime sky in the fifth panel and a different, rainy sky in the sixth to show a recurring scene over a period of time. Hopefully it worked. One problem I found was that I felt a little restricted by the size of the panels. Sure, I could've drawn my own with some panels being larger than others. But the assignment was to recreate a standard nine-panel page. So I had to make sure that I had enough room in each panel to illustrate my story without it looking too cluttered or running out of space.

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Possibilities for Final Project

I’m not gonna lie, I haven’t spent too much time thinking about the final project. However, I have noticed a few genre’s and comic styles that I’m interested in.

One genre I’ve been interested in is the photo comic. Now, I don’t take an interest in this because half of the work is just photos. Some might think that the photo comic is the easy way out. However, I like photo comic-style that was used in The Photographer, where Guibert used a pretty equal amount of both photos and comic illustrations. I like how he was able to take a picture of something/someone and then draw them but without having to include every single detail. I like how the photo comic doesn’t make you re-draw the exact picture, instead they supplement each other. For instance, Guibert used comics to go with the narration and to include character dialogue, and he would use photography to supplement what was described and shown in the comics.

Another comic aspect that I might want to try for the final project is color. I have only drawn my comics with black pen on a white paper. I’d like to see how I can incorporate color in my comics because I feel like it could make a less-detailed illustration more vibrant. Perhaps the background of the panels could be different colors, while the illustrations are in black ink. The colored panels could represent whatever mood or emotion is represented in that panel? Or I could Use colored pens and make every aspect of the panel filled with color. I haven’t had much practice with it, but I like how color was used in The Photographer and I would like to see how I could use that effect myself.

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Things I’ve Learned, Things to Steal

One of the graphic novels we read as part of the class was Julio’s Day. It’s only the second graphic novel out of our long list we have yet to read, but I already feel like it’s so different in terms of the story, artwork and the choices the author made that push the boundaries of the comic genre.

On a more global scale, I like how Julio’s Day pushes the comic form to new levels in terms of it’s provocativeness. I read that the original comic book that Julio’s Day was serialized in was one of the first comics that was part of the alternative comic era. After googling, I found out that the alternative era was basically when comics started to shift from the mainstream superhero stuff and into more real, raunchier stuff. I think Julio’s Day is a perfect representation of that alternativeness. Among the illustrations included naked people and even a sex scene. It was all in cartoon but none of it felt childish or funny. Julio’s Day also did a good job of showing the common person and all their imperfections. I guess this is part of that alternative movement, but the characters aren’t these pristine, muscle-y characters like in superhero comics. They look like normal people and Hernandez did a great job of showing the ugly side of the human body. 

Getting more specific, I liked how Hernandez accomplished so much imagery with his characters. The book doesn’t have any narration at all and the only words are the dialogue from the characters. There are many panels, however, that the characters are not speaking in. These panels show a real emotion through the character’s face. There’s a scene when Julio and his mother realize that his sister is going mentally insane. The final panel in the sequence simply shows Julio and his mother. No caption, no dialogue, but you can see the sorrow in their faces. The sadness they feel for her and the lost hope that she will ever be her normal self again. All of that without a single word. That’s something I would love to accomplish in my own work. It’s not even that the illustrations are so detailed and profound, they’re actually quite basic. But how the hell did Hernandez reflect so many emotions in their faces? Is it the eyes? Eyebrows? I feel like eyebrow shape can turn a confused character to an angry character with a single stroke of the pen. Knowing that Hernandez’s illustrations were not far from basic drawing and he was able to depict so much emotion in them gives me hope for my own comics.

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My Evolving Process

Well, it’s officially been 4 weeks since I started my experience as a comic creator. It didn’t take much thought for me to realize that I am loving this experience. Learning about comics and creating comics are so outside of my comfort zone that I feel the nervous-excited adrenaline that you feel when you ride a roller coaster for the first time. I am having a blast and am excited to see where my comic-creating will take me.

A basic sketchbook and a Papermate pen have been my fellow colleagues along the journey. These tools for the creation of comics had a bigger influence on the process than I thought. First, there is no erasing involved. I practice my ideas on a page as many times as I can for it to look right. It’s kind of interesting having to practice like that. Using repetitiveness and precision until it looks right. Last time I practiced like that was when I was working on my corner shots in middle school soccer. When I practice writing, I don’t have to focus on what the words look like, only how they sound. I don’t have to write random sentences all over a page and pick which one looks best. I write and re-write and edit and re-write again. I guess that’s how practicing writing and drawing are similar. Just do it over and over and over again until you get the hang.

One thing I mentioned in a previous post was that my confidence towards my drawing was severely low, so low that it started to affect my strive and work ethic. It also didn’t help that I didn’t use a pencil and eraser to sketch the comics before inking them, putting even more pressure on myself. Since then, my confidence has grown, and the idea of only using a pen challenges me in a surprisingly exciting way. 

The second implication of using a pen is that if I mess up on one panel, the whole comic is ruined. I have only a very small sense of relief after finishing a first panel, because I know I have to get through at least two more without screwing anything up. It sucks and it’s stressful, but I learned it’s part of the challenge. I could easily draw my first panel or draw my characters on a separate page and trace them onto my next panels. Or, I could draw all of the panels on different pages and cut them out and put them in a sequence. First of all, I could never live with the guilt of “cheating” in a comic by tracing my illustrations because I cannot cheat in any aspect of my life without dying inside. Secondly, even if the character looks a little different in the second panel than the first, that’s what makes comics unique, right? I like the idea of slight imperfections coming through. It reminds me that a human-being actually drew that with a pen, no digital programming involved. I like keeping it old-school like that.

Whether it’s true or not, I feel like my drawing is getting better. It could be my burst of confidence or the practice is actually paying off. But I’ve started to be really satisfied with the drawings I’ve made, even if they are sub-par compared to others. 

Last week I drew a cartoon Donald Trump. One thing I knew I had to represent in the comic: the hair. Because my drawing is still very basic and I cannot recreate those wonderful faces that he makes, I knew that recreating the hair was my only shot at getting something that looked like Trump. I spent at least 45 minutes trying to duplicate those blond locks but it was actually really hard. I thought of ways to create the comic without having Trump in it because I just couldn’t draw that hair. The only cartoon hair I had done was long lines for a girl and short, sprinkle-looking lines for a guy. After nearly an hour, I finally created something I was happy with. And, as expected, the hair in all three panels is a little different. But, I am really happy with my outcome.

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An adaptation comic. My little cartoon Trump turned out so much better than I thought it would :') This comic shows the physical action of his tweet. I decided to take this outrageous tweet and add the ironic dialogue of the average American. It's basically representing the common reaction to his ridiculous tweets.

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A photo comic. I think it illustrates an emotion, or progression of emotions that we've all felt: the immense happiness we feel when holding a little kitten or small animal, then the sadness we feel when they scamper away. Although it's not necessarily a sadness. It's more of a "okay, little guy, go explore the world!" feeling. This task was a lot easier than I thought. I was at a party and I decided to capture my friend playing with the little kitten of the house, which obviously was the center of attention for everyone in attendance. I don't completely disagree with McCloud that it's sometimes easier to listen to a cartoon narrator. But I think if the photo-narrator captures a universal emotion, a moment that so many people are familiar with, like the one captured above, it makes it very easy to listen and understand.