The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

This is just a draft. Will be completed later

When choosing what object to use for my multi media piece I took the time to notice the everyday objects in my life and look for ones with interesting shapes that I could harness for my project. When I was getting ready one morning I noticed the unique silhouette of my hairbrush and its handle’s similarity to the neck of a guitar. I decided I would use the hairbrush for my image but make it less conspicuous by facing the plastic needles downward on the page, thus drawing more attention to the outline it created. Since the hairbrush is bright pink, I decided to stick with a neon color palette to tie the piece together better. Since part of the guitar was blocked by the horizontal plastic bars of the brush, I chose a neon yellow for the hole in my guitar in hopes that it would shine through better. I added some bold lightning jolts in order to help animate the piece and help the viewer envision its radiating sound. For my title, I did a play on the rock band “Kings of Leon”, which fit my piece both for its neon colors and its musical focus.

Find the Sk2 prompt here:

For my Sunday Sketch, I decided to combine my favorite game, bananagrams, with my favorite plant, the banana tree. Bananagrams has been my favorite game forever. My family and I would play it every night when I was a kid, and my friends and I would play it almost every night in high school. Normally, I don’t have the best vocabulary, but that all changes once I’m playing bananagrams. My mind goes into this competitive state where I truly feel happy and involved. I have played so many times that I know how many of each letter there are in the bag and the probability that each letter would come up. Not only do I love bananagrams, but I also love the banana tree. When my Grandma was alive, she taught me everything there is to know about the banana tree. She and my Grandpa lived in rural North Carolina where banana trees are not native, so it was extremely difficult to tend to. My Grandparents were not busy people, so they spent lots of time tending to their massive garden. Because of this, I learned the ins and outs of the banana tree. When I am retired, I am sure that I will have at least one banana tree in my garden.

One artistic choice that I placed in the piece was that I made some of the bananas ripe while others had yet to ripen. Each banana represents a piece of my independence, and the more ripe a banana is, the more independent I am in some aspect of my life. Although I have many ripe bananas stemming from my lived experiences in high school, I still have many bananas that have yet to ripen. These bananas will hopefully become ripe during college or beyond. I also incorporated a word coming out of the bananagrams bag. The word I chose was ‘security’ because the more independent I get, the less secure I feel. When I was in high school, I was inclined to take lots of risks because I knew that I could always fall back on my Dad once I failed. In college, taking risks is a lot more difficult because with the independence of living on my own, I also lose the security net that my Dad gave me.

Here is the link to the Sunday Sketch assignment.

I had the idea for the Coca Cola one a week ago. I think I was intrigued by the concept of playing with perspective and I wanted a dynamic image with perspective of the face and the Coke flowing in mid-air. I ended up doing a “mock-up” of my idea last week which is what you see here.

When I sat down to do my “real” version of the image something just didn’t feel right. I wanted to try something different. I didn’t like how the red Coca Cola bottle popped out so much from the black and white drawing. First I grabbed for a charging cord. Then when I got my mechanical pencil out of my pencil bag I saw all of my other pencils and pens just sitting there, practically asking to be used. My natural instinct went straight to drawing an eye. I actually have a long history of drawing hundreds of eyes over the years, slowly booming more and more realistic. They are my favorite thing to draw and I love exploring different styles, so this seemed like a natural experiment for me to take. Once that idea took hold it couldn’t be stopped. I quickly walked around to my hall mates and borrowed most of the blue pens and mechanicals that you see there. I was a little rushed with putting together the whole image because I had to leave to pick my brother up from the airport, but overall I’m happy with the experiment in style.