The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

Category: Student Posts

Groove-o-Meter

Student Posts

To discover just how disco-groovy my week is, I decided to measure how often music is a part of my day-to-day life, and as it turns out, I was boppin’ a whole lot. Eighty-four percent of my week’s hours were spent grooving, which in a way makes sense, for I often use tunes to give myself that motivation to get stuff done.

I decided not to include my morning alarms as music, despite it consisting of a song, since I usually shut it off real quickly anyways. Also, I forgot to record my Wednesday, so I substituted a second Sunday to fill in that final seventh spot. How groovy is my Wednesday? We’ll never know.

Creating the graphic took a rather long time, and in hindsight, I probably should have just drawn it on a sheet of paper. I had to stack multiple images in order to show the full infographic because downloading it was locked behind a subscription fee for infogram.com. Although if you’d like to see the full infographic as one complete image, you can click here.

All in all, I think the Groove-o-Meter does a good job measuring my daily groove, and I am excited to listen to some more bops as soon as I’m done uploading this in 5, 4, 3, 2, 1…

Her Journey

Student Posts

Her

direction

was, in a word,

truth

I really enjoyed making this assignment. I will admit, it took me way longer than I expected for me to actually complete the assignment but once I had finished I was proud of what I made. I started off with 3 separate double sided pages and I was really struggling to find words on a page that flowed well. Each day I would look at one of the pages back and front and try to come up with an idea. After 3 days, I had read through all the papers and hadn’t had a clue what I was going to do.

This all changed when I stopped looking at the assignment as a sort of puzzle, trying to fit pieces together to make up a big picture, but rather a journey, where you follow one word to another. Once I mentally made that decision, I had a much easier time finding the words on the page I wanted to use. From there, I knew exactly what I wanted to draw, a pathway. For one, this pathway symbolizes “her” journey in my story, but it also symbolizes the journey I took to string the words together on the page. From there I added other designs to the page to fill up some of the empty space and finally was able to conquer this assignment!

Fake Hunger

Student Posts

This assignment came in two parts. The first part was coming up with my poem. In order to do this I read through all of the pages I selected, and first chose the page I found most interesting. After deciding on that page I re-read it over and over again in order to craft my poem. I started by just circling a bunch of phrases and words I found interesting, until eventually I came up with my poem.

The second part was deciding what to draw in order to depict my poem. My poem is all about hunger but more importantly peoples situation and life, and how there is always someone out there that has it worse than you. I decided to draw two plates of food. One of them with a ton of food on it and the other very bare and with no protein, just a few peas and carrots.

For Her

Student Posts

Human Document

Not much planning involved before I decided the page and the words for my Human Document assignment. As a result, I was able to complete this in a relatively short time. I started off with a few interesting words and phrases and then selected the next ones that rhymed. I hope the text actually makes sense, but if not, at least it flows smoothly 🙂

Digitalizing the page before drawing saved me from a lot of trouble. It was easy to draw and make changes digitally. And there are plenty of tools on the iPad – all sizes and colors of pens and brushes  – to help me achieve different effects I desired.

Assignment Link: https://eng181f19.davidmorgen.org/assignments/sketches/sketch-8-human-document/

Human Document: Sawyer Steinmiller

Student Posts
Al

I really struggled on this assignment (I am turning it in a day late). First of all, my Dad was here for all of parents weekend and I only see him a couple of weeks out of the year; because of this, I didn’t start my homework until 5 PM on Sunday, and I started this assignment at about 11 PM on Sunday Night. I went through all of the submissions and was truly blown away. Unlike the previous Sunday Sketches, it really seemed like everyone was an artist. It really stressed me out, and in a frenzy, I decided to go to bed instead of finishing the assignment. When actually making the page, I just started drawing away with Ore at Complex. When looking back on my work today, I decided to totally scrap that and start over. I then spent about 2 hours reading the pages, trying to find some sort of meaning in a somewhat random assortment of words. I ended up choosing something that I would not have written about in a million years. In my avatar post, I explained about how instead of reflecting on lows in my life, I was going to try and reflect on the highs in order to keep my mental health strong throughout the year. Instead of doing that, I dug deep to one of my lowest lows. This page is about when I was in a forced abusive relationship for about a year. I am not going to go into too much detail, but I try and make my point about how the relationship was abusive in a physical and emotional way. I tried my best to draw gravestones in the center of the page. Her gravestone is what kept me bound to the relationship and my gravestone is actually being in the relationship itself. Overall, I am pretty disappointed in my work. Not only was I a day late, but I do not think I properly expressed my story. It is moments like these when not having practice in any art field really made me feel like an outlier compared to the other students. Hopefully in the future, I am able to find my groove. I might redo this assignment before the end of the semester; even if it does not impact my grade at all, I really want to produce something that I am proud of, especially if it is about such a meaningful time in my life.

Here is a link to the rubric.

“Depend on you?”

Student Posts

For my human document I started by glancing over the page I had chosen and highlighting words that stood out using a colored pencil. I varied the color I used based on what emotions I felt the word elicited. Once I had a narrowed down set of words to work with, I went along boxing in the words I wanted to use in my poem, adding articles and punctuation when needed. As I went along, I used my pen to add illustrations that underlined the meaning of certain key words. I particularly like how I drew a silhouette of a man holding up the words “depend on,” and make his footing be on an unstable pile of bricks. I thought this signified the unreliability of the man in my poem. Last, I used white paint to cover the parts of the page that I didn’t want the audience to pay attention to, especially since some of the words I had originally highlighted but not used in my poem would have caused confusion. I enjoyed this project a lot because it gave me the opportunity to be really creative; however, I also found it very difficult and time consuming to choose the words to use in my poem, since so many were on the page for me to choose from.

my face.

Student Posts

my face.
got everything–all colors, all
types,
it looks the least bit unusual.

in bleach born.
all black and strange.
between lips, in eyes.
color,

dark and wild as any child
another way of calling me

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