Tag: funny

My About Me page just got a fresh new coat of paint, so I’d recommend heading on over there if you want to spot this squeaky swordsman among the colorful new collages.

When reworking my literacy narrative, I wanted to create visuals which grabbed readers’ attentions by being bright, bold, and, if I may be so bold, bemusing. Yet there was one small obstacle in my way: the fact that I am not the best of drawers, and cannot convey with a mere pencil and paper my ludicrous ideas sprung from my peculiar imagination. As such, I intermixed my simple stick-figure sketches with several “comic collages,” which I created by throwing a bunch of free-to-use internet images together. Making a digital footprint requires both eye-catching spectacles and a unique identity, and hopefully my use of silly sketches and ridiculous photo-mashups provides an interesting means of telling my story.

While these collages may seem to be mostly haphazard mashes that took little thought towards staging and framing, I actually did a good bit of planning these out before sitting down at the computer to edit. For instance, all moments of me making positive progress towards my goal of enjoying some books show me moving visually from the left to the right. Meanwhile, whenever some trouble strikes and I lose some love for reading, the agent of detriment or I move right to left. Even though none of my images appear side by side one another, I still wanted the momentum of progress and regression to be consistent throughout the comic.

I kept a couple of the images that, when reviewed by my peers in class, garnered favorable reviews and were more easy to understand. One of those, the “Stream of Consciousness” sketch, was run through a photo-editor effect to give a dreamy, watery flow that fits with the subject. This wasn’t something I planned to do beforehand, but rather I stumbled across the effect while cropping it and decided it would serve my story well.

One of the cool aspects of this whole “comic collage” method is how it forces you to be somewhat adaptable towards your original artistic vision. Multiple times throughout this narrative’s creation, I would search for images online to fulfill whatever ideas I had in my head only to find out that no such image exists (at least among those of the public domain). As such, I’d have to select one which, while not my first choice, would either work just as well or even better. For instance, that little clay mouse from earlier was stumbled upon when I couldn’t find a quality non-copyrighted image of the film adaptation of Despereaux, and quite frankly, the clay one is funnier to look at and much more adorable.

Putting these collages together are almost like assembling the pieces of a puzzle, trying to find the right images to work in each panel, a lengthy process in attempting to create the best version possible. Admittedly, it does take a good bit of time, and sometimes a simple drawing would suffice, but I’d like to think the clarity and color gained make it worth the struggle.

All in all, I’m very pleased with my colorful comic collages, for they help my life stuff story come to life! And the pun in that previous sentence was most definitely intended.

A Long List of So Many Sources for My Comic Collages:

http://clipart-library.com/clip-art/sign-transparent-background-1.htm

http://pngimg.com/download/2112

https://publicdomainvectors.org/en/free-clipart/Cartoon-thought-bubble-vector-image/7276.html

https://pixabay.com/illustrations/lightning-bolt-lightning-bolt-mp-1203953/

https://www.maxpixel.net/Stacked-Book-Stack-Books-Book-Literature-3342628

https://www.needpix.com/photo/86601/stick-man-people-standing-pec-stick-stick-figure-man-person

https://www.needpix.com/photo/93108/walking-hiking-stickman-stick-figure-matchstick-man-man

https://www.pexels.com/photo/construction-wreck-wreckage-395928/

https://www.needpix.com/photo/56632/biplane-airplane-oldtimer-yellow-fly-pilot-sky-plane

https://pixabay.com/vectors/stickman-stick-figure-matchstick-man-151356/

https://www.needpix.com/photo/download/854542/book-paper-text-textbook-tome-free-vector-graphics-free-pictures-free-photos-free-images

https://www.netclipart.com/isee/wTTbho_nuclear-bomb-blast-png-transparent-background-explosion-png/

Editing was done using the PicsArt app and befunky photo editor.