The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

This was originally a photo of me teeing off at a golf course with my Dad. I picked this photo because I recently bought my plane tickets back home for fall break and am excited to see my Dad. I’ve been thinking about him a lot and appreciating his style of parenting. This photo was taken in Florida- we travel there every two years to visit my Grandparents. I picked the light saber to go along with the picture because I thought my form looked like I was slicing someone’s stomach open. My Dad is also a huge Star Wars fan and I wanted to create something that I could send to him. I picked a purple light saber because my favorite Jedi, Mace Windu, uses one.

This Photoshop job was relatively harder than the previous one. I used a different software this time to create the image- Pixlr. It took me an extremely long time to get acclimated to the program. I used the lasso tool a lot, but sometimes I could not copy specific parts to paste onto blank space. That is why the desert area by the tip of the light saber looks like a different shade; I just used the pencil tool. I think my photo conveys that if I were to live in the Star Wars universe, I could be a solid Jedi. In my opinion, my form is impeccable and will be practicing just in case I do find out how to transport into a different universe. I also think that this conveys how similar sword fighting is to golf! They both use similar swings, and although sword fighting has a larger variety of strokes, this one stroke looks very similar.

Here is a link to the stock photo I got of the light saber.

Here is a link to the original assignment.

This weeks Sunday Sketch was one of the most difficult ones I’ve done so far. I spent days looking at images on Flickr trying to find two that could possible be pieced together. When I saw the picture of the diver I knew I could turn it into a larger image so I began searching for another picture that would closely resemble the ocean background color. I found the image of the teacup and I knew it would fit perfectly. The most difficult part of the assignment was trying to create an original image that you couldn’t already find somewhere online. There were so many great examples that it became harder to make one of my own after I kept discovering more and more combophotos.

The actual editing of the photo was not very hard at all. I combined the two images and slightly blended them together to make the picture a bit more coherent. After creating several different combophotos from many images and ideas, I chose this one because I believe the two images went very well together and demonstrated a very nice larger picture at hand. I am pretty proud of the final image and enjoy the entertainment of the contradictory sizes of both the diver and teacup. To view this week’s Sunday Sketch prompt click here.

Photo Credits: Diver & Teacup

This is a combination of one of the most famous photos of all time, Earthrise by NASA, and a soccer ball image I pulled from Target’s website. I knew very quickly that I wanted to use this specific space photo. I have been a huge space geek for years, and this photo has been my background/profile picture on many different devices and accounts. What I spent most of my time on was deciding on what spherical object to replace the Earth with. My first idea was to make some “deep” and “original” message by imposing a spherical ball of trash, but that felt really basic. I have played soccer for the past 16 years of my life however, so it didn’t take me too long.

The process of editing was very simple. Actually too simple. Once I put the image in place I decided to add some shadow to the ball. But even then it still felt kinda off and too unnatural and easy, so I made the image slightly translucent which let some Earth texture in. Even though it’s not exactly following the assignment, it made the image much more pleasant to look at.

What I’m realizing now is that this assignment was too easy. There was too much freedom and too many options. I didn’t really like that though. My main frustration was trying to come up with something original among the generic and unlimited ideas easily accessible from the toolbox of the internet. Nevertheless… I made something. I can’t say I’m proud of it, but I can at least say I’m glad I didn’t settle for the most basic version…

While having lunch today, I began to feel a little bored, so I started to stare at the food on my plate in a daze. Suddenly, I saw the broccoli on my fork, and it reminded me of a miniature tree. With this week’s sketch assignment in mind, I decided to combine the upper part of broccoli and the trunk of a tree to form a whole picture. 

I started by searching up pictures of broccoli and trees on Google, and I experimented by putting them together. However, the original background of the broccoli picture was white, and thus it didn’t match the blue sky background in the tree photo. Therefore, for the first time in my life, I tried to use Snapseed, a photo editing app, to manually add a blue sky background for the broccoli picture. Although the edited image seems a little fake in general, it does create a better transition between the two pictures.

The final picture surprised me initially because I never thought a tree and broccoli would go so well together. Sometimes when I see the small version of the combo photo on my desktop, I mistake it as a real tree growing vibrantly in the wild. I think the fact that the broccoli in itself is green and luxuriant adds a quality of vitality to the tree. Also, considering that the tiny broccoli which can easily be fit into my mouth is now as “large” as the canopy of a tree is amazingly peculiar and striking.