The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

Tag: sk2

A Fairy Good Sunday Sketch

Student Posts

I was walking to the library when I noticed a bunch of pink flowers surrounding a bike stand. They reminded me of the design accounts I follow on Instagram that incorporate nature with fashion. Inspiration struck, and I was off looking for fallen flowers and other pieces of nature on my way to the library. One of my many passions is fashion design. I used to fantasize about it as a career, but reality struck, and my secret desire was pushed aside to the margins of my notebooks. This sketch assignment gave me the opportunity to embrace fashion design in a creative way. The dainty flowers and earthy leaves immediately made me think of a fairy. After sketching the base, I mixed and matched until the outfit and wings resembled something of a fashionable fairy. Is it perfect? No. Did I have fun and do I want to continue making outfits out of nature? Yes. The process of making and uploading this sketch also proved much easier than the first sketch, making me feel hopeful about my technological abilites moving forward.

Sketch 2: Sunday Sketches

Sketches

Due: 9/15
Tag: sk2

Christoph Niemann is an illustrator, artist, and author whose work regularly appears in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and elsewhere. He’s got a mixed media series that he calls “Sunday Sketches,” in which he takes some object from his surroundings and creates a sketch on the page around it. Some of the best such works he’s included in his book entitled Sunday Sketching.

Some examples from Niemann’s Tumblr:

You can see that each of these pieces is an actual three-dimensional tangible object placed into a drawing on paper to transform that object into something new. Niemann then photographs the resulting sketch to create a two-dimensional artifact.

For your third sketch assignment, I want you to create your own Sunday sketch in a similar style.

  • Take a picture of your sketch and publish it as a post.
  • Give your post a funny or witty title.
  • Write a paragraph or two in which you explain the process whereby you came up with the idea for your Sunday sketch and the choices you made in realizing that idea as an actual sketch.
  • Include a link back to this prompt and tag it “sk2”
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