The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

Category: Student Posts

Learning is Like a Pencil

Student Posts

Out of all of the possibilities of what to compare the learning outcomes of this class I chose a pencil, pen and pencil sharpener. It sounds lazy but in actuality, those are probably the three tools I have used the most for this class. For most of the Sunday Sketches I favored drawing them out to digital work if I could help it and I went through a few inches of my pencils this way. Then there was part 2 of the literacy narrative and tracing pages. Honestly, even though this class required a moderate use of technology, my pencils and pens were Ol’ Reliable.

Teen Slasher

Student Posts

If I’m being quite honest, I haven’t seen one of the Friday the 13th movies, but I had the mask and machete from Halloween so I decided that’s what I would go with. I’ve seen a couple video games with Jason decapitating people so I figured they got it from the movies, I was wrong. It took me a while to find a clip of Jason slashing someone’s throat so and the fake blood was already on my friends neck so that’s what we had to go with. The photo was nowhere near an exact replica but it gets the gist of the scene and I think that it has its own flair.

Sekiro: Shadows Die Then Rage Quit

Student Posts

This was probably the Sunday Sketch that took me the longest to figure out what I was going to do for it, but it is definitely my favorite. I decided to make my true story, five paged comic about the current video game that I’m playing. When I have free time on weekends I tend to play Sekiro and it is one of the hardest, most rewarding games that I have played in years. I figured since I’ve played it so much that there would have to be at least one funny moment. I chose the final boss fight that I have been stuck on for a few weeks now. One time I got so mad that I’m surprised my controller is still in one piece. There was a lot happening within the boss fight so I just made sure to put the important parts of the fight starting, me getting killed, and then my rage quit. Making this comic a true story was hard just because I couldn’t think of anything interesting at first and then this idea just hit me while I was eating breakfast one morning.

Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream Dream

Student Posts

For my data visualization, I wanted to track my dreams over the span of a week and see how my daily life influences what my dreams are. I decided to make my visualization in the form a bar graph and for the three types of dreams: violent, inappropriate, and slice of life, I drew the bar as something that represents the type of dream. One note is the bar graph has eight dreams because certain dreams overlapped in terms of content.

One of the slice of life dreams I had was that my credit card declined when I attempted to buy some food. It was kind of funny because I was stressing over spending too much money during that week so that dream made a lot sense to me. Another dream in that category was that I was back at my high school, it was prom, and my friends were playing in the live band. The weekend before I started tracking my dreams, I went back to my high school to see their rendition of Mamma Mia, which a LOT of my friends were in. The slice of life dreams seemed to be fairly explainable.

Since this is for a school project I’m going to skip over some of the dreams and just go straight to the violent ones. One dream that I had was that me and my sister were younger, like 10 and 8, and we were being chased through our house by a man with a gun and gas mask. To gloss over some of the more graphic details we killed him and ran. This dream came right after I watched a Call of Duty stream where in one of the campaign missions, you were a little girl trying to stop a soldier from killing her brother.

Going over my dreams, it seemed that there is a correlation to what I did that day or sometime the week before. Usually I feel like this isn’t the case. From what I remember before tracking my dreams, they had little correlation to what I did during the week. In would tend to see my friends and other people who I interact with on the daily but other than that the dreams were usually pretty random.

Confession

Student Posts

Text: “He confessed American. Cruder than life, vivid discrimination, irrelevant, ominously grim, insidious.”

This was honestly a hard assignment to think of a picture to draw. I couldn’t come up with anything after staring at my page for a few hours. I came back to it late at night and decided just to focus on the word ‘American’ and I began underlining words. For some reason I was drawn towards the darker adjectives and I think it works with today’s political climate. I feel that the poem thingy, reflects how many people inside and outside of America currently view the country and many of the people living within it.

Confession

Student Posts

Text: “He confessed American. Cruder than life, vivid discrimination, irrelevant, ominously grim, insidious.”

This was honestly a hard assignment to think of a picture to draw. I couldn’t come up with anything after staring at my page for a few hours. I came back to it late at night and decided just to focus on the word ‘American’ and I began underlining words. For some reason I was drawn towards the darker adjectives and I think it works with today’s political climate. I feel that the poem thingy, reflects how many people inside and outside of America currently view the country and many of the people living within it.

Evolution of Brothers

Student Posts
  • In the beginning…
  • We came together to make music
  • Hundreds of miles may separate us…
  • But the friendship still remains

I decided to make a comic about my band in high school. I chose some of highlight photos of a band I was in during high school. I decided to make a comic about this because I was talking to a few of the guys recently and we agreed this was the best time of high school. For the composition of the piece, I decided to choose chronological pictures of our performances. The first picture is from sophomore year homecoming, the next is junior year homecoming, a charity event we played at, and our senior prom. I thought that making the triptych was easier because the middle is just one page instead of two but it still felt natural with two in the quadriptych.

Bag o’ Stuff

Student Posts

A quick description of the items contained in my bag:

My laptop and charger which I never leave my dorm room without.

A sketchbook and set of lead pencils for when I decide to draw in my free time.

My lab notebook for chemistry which haunts me in my sleep.

Two spiral notebooks and a calculator for classes.

A Slipknot and Starset t-shirt. Both of these bands I live this semester and have decent stories behind each of the shows.

Finally a sticker that reads “Follow @MC.SUCC”, a meme page that a friend of a friend runs.

After cataloging the items in my bag, I would say that this is a decent representation of myself. Starset and Slipknot are bands that I like to listen to often and the meme page sticker I have in my bag is a good representation of the dark humor that make sometimes. I actually did not anything to my bag because I felt that there was nothing that I needed to add to the post. In hindsight though, I might’ve added my 3DS. Probably the most challenging part of the assignment was arranging my items to make them pleasing to the eye. I don’t photograph much unless I’m taking pictures for someone so it was just kinda new for me. I feel that representing myself in a catalogue of items from my bag is form of writing because it gives a reader a glimpse into my everyday life and what I do for fun or school.

Bag o’ Stuff

Student Posts

A quick description of the items contained in my bag:

My laptop and charger which I never leave my dorm room without.

A sketchbook and set of lead pencils for when I decide to draw in my free time.

My lab notebook for chemistry which haunts me in my sleep.

Two spiral notebooks and a calculator for classes.

A Slipknot and Starset t-shirt. Both of these bands I live this semester and have decent stories behind each of the shows.

Finally a sticker that reads “Follow @MC.SUCC”, a meme page that a friend of a friend runs.

After cataloging the items in my bag, I would say that this is a decent representation of myself. Starset and Slipknot are bands that I like to listen to often and the meme page sticker I have in my bag is a good representation of the dark humor that make sometimes. I actually did not anything to my bag because I felt that there was nothing that I needed to add to the post. In hindsight though, I might’ve added my 3DS. Probably the most challenging part of the assignment was arranging my items to make them pleasing to the eye. I don’t photograph much unless I’m taking pictures for someone so it was just kinda new for me. I feel that representing myself in a catalogue of items from my bag is form of writing because it gives a reader a glimpse into my everyday life and what I do for fun or school.

Three Useless Thespians

Student Posts

Making a triptych was a fun yet challenging project. I knew that for this one, I didn’t want to draw one out but use some old photos I have on my phone. I ended up using three photos from closing night of a play that I directed. Me and my friend Saanya directed a play and Parker was one of the actors in the show. On our own we can do our assigned tasks but get us all together and we won’t get anything done with all of our laughter. I liked creating the first two panels with only slight differences in facial expressions to the last panel that is a close up on my face. I have a “oh well, it is what it is” look. I feel that creating this kind of comic strip is easier because with three panels you have a defined beginning, middle, and end where as, with writing you can go on longer tangents without having discernible markers.

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