#rhetoricofcomics

Discovery Task 2:

When it comes to being me, the question about Pansexuality comes up a lot. So here it is explained.

This task took me about three and a half hours to complete from start to finish. When I started I had no idea what I wanted to draw, and as far as what style I wanted to draw in I was clueless. I took a lot of my time figuring out a concept, and then how I wanted to portray that concept.

“The Photographer” is a bombshell. I eagerly flipped through each page admiring the design and feeling captivated by the story-telling element. What made this piece so unique was story-telling through illustrations and real photographs of the people, landscape and culture in Afghanistan. 

This distinct page on 147 inspires me to integrate photography into my comic creations as a storytelling element, not the entirety of the piece. The rawness of each photograph creates more layers to the story. In this panel you can see visually, without the creator telling you, that the character is chain smoking as he spirals off with his thoughts. The photographs are complimented by an illustration continuing the chain smoking conversation. Two additional photographs act as establishing shots for this panel and draws the entire page together. 

Discovery Task 4

Sneak preview? Sneak preview!!

This is the first page of my final comic for class! It’s also the only fully colored page of the comic (for now). I decided that, for the purpose of the project, it would be best to use the first page as the “splash” page and color it, leaving the rest uncolored. I am no digital artist, and coloring this page alone took me close to 4 hours.

The technique of having a splash page be a page of the comic itself is relatively popular/common in Japanese manga, though the splash page is usually reserved for a large center-fold, or it takes up the first two or three pages of the comic instead.

I used flat colors with selective blending and coloring because, I’ll be honest, this digital coloring was mostly experimentation.

Anyway, this isn’t an official journal post or anything, I’m just too excited about this project to resist sharing it.

Discovery Task 8:

I know I’ve fallen a bit off the wagon with discovery tasks, and getting back into it was hard. Especially with this one for me. As I’ve said before I am a perfectionist, but when it comes to collages being messy with purpose is embraced. So I tried to let myself go a little crazy with it.

I wanted the panels to be a road map, since that’s not quite traditional, and took the collage theme to heart and broke out the mod podge and magazines. Part of the story and collage is the canvas I chose to work with itself. The paper is my old server notebooks glued together to signify my past and how I have embraced change, as much as I fear it.

Discovery Task #3

In this comic I explore the “subject to subject” panel transition. This comic characterizes a long night as a server at a fine-dining restaurant. I enjoyed the process for this comic and was very pleased with the results. 

I ventured into focusing more on backgrounds and details. One detail I’m super impressed by is the checkerboard tiled floor depicted in panels one and four. I feel that it adds a dimension that was not originally intended. I also enjoy the clock as a transitional tool that illustrates time passing.

I’m starting to feel comfortable with a slight style I am developing. I would like to work on making the character I draw more consistent, at least through one comic strip. I suppose the best practice for this is to draw the character over and over again. I’m excited to compare my early on development of my character to the final form towards the end of the semester.