The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

Category: Student Posts

Literacy Narrative pt. 2 reflection

Student Posts

Creating this part of my literacy narrative was a huge change from having to just write my thoughts out on paper. In this part of the literacy narrative project, I was able to express my thoughts in a visual manor by drawing out comic panels. I found this much easier to do rather than write everything down as I am a visual learner, meaning when I formulate ideas in my head they are almost always presented as pictures. From there I normally would have to translate those images to words to complete what ever assignment I am writing. For this assignment, however, I was just able to draw what I originally imagined in my head, which made the process of brainstorming and organizing my ideas a lot less strenuous. I didn’t have to spend excess time making sure what I was writing lines up with the idea I had in my head, I could just let my thoughts flow. 

Drawing out my literacy narrative in comic form made me realize that in the alphabetical form, my tone is a lot more aggressive towards technology than I want it to be. I found that in the comic literacy narrative, I was able to show that there are pros and cons for both a life with and without technology. In the alphabetical version, however, I seem to favor the life without technology which is not the intention I wanted to give. Due to this realization, I have plans to go back to the original literacy narrative and edit it to make it highlight the pros and cons of technology.

One of the biggest choices I made when creating this comic was to only use pencil. I knew from the beginning I didn’t want to use color as I had chosen a very simplistic style of drawing and using color would have taken away from that style. Originally, I wanted to outline all the lines with pen, to make the lines much bolder and easier to see. In the final product, however, I did not end up outlining anything with pen. This is because I began to use the technique of shading in some of the comic panels. I thought that if I used pen to outline the drawings it would take away some of the depth that the shading creates. In the final product, it is somewhat hard to see the shading as the scanner did not pick it up very well (it’s easiest to see on page 3). 

When writing drawing out this comic, I was able to practice some of the learning outcomes we discussed as a class. Two of the ones I found the most prevalent for this project was “Visual Thinking” and “Writing as Process”. I noticed myself using visual thinking when I was planning out how to arrange my comic. This really helped with organization of my ideas and let me spend less time brain storming and more time creating. I found myself using “writing as process” during this assignment as I went through multiple drafts of my comics. Each time I made a draft I got peer feedback witch allowed me to improve on my project. 

https://nixstudent.wordpress.com/literacy-narrative-pt-2/

E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial… kind of

Student Posts

For this week’s recreation of a movie assignment I chose to depict a scene from the classic movie- E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial. When I saw the picture of this particular scene I knew it be great to try to recreate. I already had the red sweatshirt and I saw a weird sloth stuffed animal hanging from my roommate’s bed that would make the perfect E.T., so I grabbed that and a basket from my residence hall lounge and hopped on some random bike for the picture. Ultimately, I think it turned out really great and I had a lot of fun completing this assignment.

Loneliness

Student Posts

This assignment for me was about pushing the bounderies of a sunday sketch and exploring different concepts I’ve learned throughout the semester. The first aspect of this comic that I focused on was the idea of a cool medium. I believe that the intention of this comic was to increase the content of the panels as the size of the page increased. In understanding this task I decided to do the opposite and make the content stay the same and even decrease as the panel size increased. This was very intentional in keeping the content of the panel simple because I wanted to draw the readers eyes to immense blank space of the comic.

The second element I decided to incorporate into this comic was the idea of a loop. I was first introduced to this concept in one of Isaac’s first posts and I’d been waiting for an oppourtunity to try it out with my own spin. The loop in this comic is that the size of the stick figure in the last panel is the exact same size as the size of the figure in the first panel. This is really to drive home the idea that “no matter how big I get, I’ll always feel small on the inside.

This comic for me was personal in that I dealt with feelings that I’ve felt for a while. Overtime they have gotten better which has directly been a product of the positive people and environment I’ve surrounded myself with at Emory. The difficulty with this comic was finding which story to tell. Which also had to do with the fact that I’ve already done this assignment for a previous post. Overall I’m very proud of what I was able to do with this comic and the creativity that I incroporated into it.

WE LIVE IN A SOCIETY……..

Student Posts

I underwent the same writing process for this assignment as I did for the previous assignments. The set of constraints allowed me to narrow down my options and focus on what I want to showcase. Arriving at my destination, I realize that my comic could potentially be more than what it currently is, but at the same time if I were to be given the freedom to construct my comic in my way than I wouldn’t be exactly sure in what I was trying to accomplish.

I chose my story to be a conversation I had with my friend, Cole, about the choice I made in wearing a Deadpool hoodie. We talked about how society impedes us with constrictions and that our choices shouldn’t be determined by society. It was slightly problematic excluding a few moments from the conversation I wanted to show on my 5-panel comic.

the link to the assignment can be found here.

True War Story

Student Posts

The constraints given with this Sunday Sketch actually aided me in finding a story which I really liked. Because this was meant to be a true story that hooked the reader from the start, I immediately started thinking of true stories that were so rare that it seemed like it couldn’t be true. Soon I realized that my life did not contain anything like that so I turned to stories which I could manipulate to seem that way and arrived at this. It starts off with an image of a hand on the ground in a pool of blood with a caption “I died once”. Right off the bat, the reader is forced to think that this cannot be a true story as I was very much alive to actually create the story. This was exactly the kind of hook that I was looking for. From there it was smooth sailing as all of the scenes I wanted to portray came to me quickly. The only difficulty I reached was that because I added much detail to the smaller drawing on the first page, I was forced to remain consistent and add similar amounts of detail even as the page continually increased in size. Overall, the assignment was a fun and interesting one to do.

Sk:10 Love Story

Student Posts

I wasn’t sure what to write about for this project but I decided to write about how I fell in love with my boyfriend over the summer because it’s a pretty unconventional story that I felt could draw the reader in. The process involved thinking back to the week I was trying to encapsulate and trying to remember the details of how everything went down. Then I decided what I wanted to be the first panel that would make the reader want to open the folded paper. I knew what I wanted the next panel to be and what I wanted to end on so the rest of the process was just filling in the time between those panels to tell the story of how we fell in love. Because of the large size of many of the panels, I found that it was not hard to find enough space to fit all the details I wanted to. In fact I found that the fourth and fifth pages had almost too much space, and I wasn’t sure how to fill it all. The most important choice I made was that I didn’t stick to telling my story chronologically; instead I began with the “ending” and then flashed back to a few days before on the next page to start the narrative. I think this made the comic more exciting as the reader knows from the beginning that it’s a love story, but doesn’t know how it’s going to unfold.

What Love Is

Student Posts

For this week’s sketch assignment, I chose to record a short conversation with my four-year-old cousin Cindy through a comic. It was one of my busiest days and I was staying up late working on my philosophy paper on the subject of Love. Suddenly, I received a FaceTime invitation from Cindy. Even though I was so stressed at the moment, her sweet voice never failed to brighten up my day. And when she told me she loves me, it was the best moment of my life. However, as adults, we tend to have this mindset that Love is too heavy a word that a kid might not truly understand the meaning of it (as if we do). To my surprise, my cousin gave the most perfect answer I have ever heard about what love is. As simple as it was, it struck me so hard that I would never forget about it.

This conversation got me thinking about how we tend to complicate things as we grow up. As we focus more and more on logical concepts and definitions, we forget to listen to what our heart has to say, and that might be the one true answer we have been looking for all along. Since this true story gave me such an interesting insight, I knew it was something I wanted to portray. 

I think the most difficult part of telling a true story through a brief comic is that life isn’t always dramatic, and most of the time, true stories can be slightly less exciting than fictional ones. When I was making my comic, I was aware that depicting a FaceTime scene can be boring since the “camera” is fixed. Therefore, I tried to use different background colors for different panels, and I also created a fantasy effect (I tried my best) for the last panel to make the narrative more visually attractive. 

Reflecting On My Comic

Student Posts

The process of completing my literacy narrative comic was difficult in the way that I had one idea and the finished product was completely different. However, I do like how the finished product came out and it has created some thoughts already in how I would edit the sole text version of my narrative. I believe that through this assignment I was able to meet the learning objectives of visual thinking and critical thinking and reading resulting in writing. I pair these together as the outcome of this assignment because it took a lot for me to figure out a way I wanted to represent my story and I went through so many ideas.

The reason it was a hard time for me to visualize how I wanted my narrative to read as a comic is because in my mind I was going to recreate something like Allie Brosh’s “Adventures in Depression, Part One” that we read in class. I viewed my anxieties of wrting as something similar to that and really made connections with that work. But in my process of brainstorming I realized that I more so see my anxiety as a separate entity that comes from the dark parts of my mind. This is why I decided to make it such a dark force and emphasize its negativity in representing its dialect in different “font”.

When drawing my narrative I was constantly thinking about how if I had more time, I could have represented everything better and it would have made more sense. When imagining how my finished product would look I didn’t have stick figures in mind or a simple black and white theme either. Even though I added some color, in my mind it was supposed to be even more colorful than that. But I can say that after finishing the narrative, I feel like what I did serves its purpose and represents my story perfectly. No matter if they are stick figures they relay the message in a powerful way.

Once I completed making my narrative into its visual component gave me more strength I think and made me feel more powerful and more in control because I could see my story rather than just living it in my mind. I was able to depict the moments where I break free from the negative thoughts from my anxiety monster and the moment where it shrinks into something minor from something that was just so overwhelming and I felt proud. Even though I go through these tough moments and it often gets very difficult, I still overcome.

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