The Secret Language of Comics: Visual Thinking and Writing

Tag: sk8

Confession

Student Posts

Text: “He confessed American. Cruder than life, vivid discrimination, irrelevant, ominously grim, insidious.”

This was honestly a hard assignment to think of a picture to draw. I couldn’t come up with anything after staring at my page for a few hours. I came back to it late at night and decided just to focus on the word ‘American’ and I began underlining words. For some reason I was drawn towards the darker adjectives and I think it works with today’s political climate. I feel that the poem thingy, reflects how many people inside and outside of America currently view the country and many of the people living within it.

Confession

Student Posts

Text: “He confessed American. Cruder than life, vivid discrimination, irrelevant, ominously grim, insidious.”

This was honestly a hard assignment to think of a picture to draw. I couldn’t come up with anything after staring at my page for a few hours. I came back to it late at night and decided just to focus on the word ‘American’ and I began underlining words. For some reason I was drawn towards the darker adjectives and I think it works with today’s political climate. I feel that the poem thingy, reflects how many people inside and outside of America currently view the country and many of the people living within it.

Fire in your Eyes

Student Posts

his torch

in his memory’s eye

with the rumbling beach and the rising tide and the freshening stars in front and above

was to stand for the redoubled thrust of flame and would make combustion sure

This assignment at first seemed like a daunting task because I had to make my own story out of a set of predetermined sentences; however once I decided to look past that and just allow myself to be free with my drawing and poem it turned out to be a therapeutic event in the midst of hardcore studying and testing.

Link back to this assignment: https://eng181f19.davidmorgen.org/assignments/sketches/sketch-8-human-document/

Her Journey

Student Posts

Her

direction

was, in a word,

truth

I really enjoyed making this assignment. I will admit, it took me way longer than I expected for me to actually complete the assignment but once I had finished I was proud of what I made. I started off with 3 separate double sided pages and I was really struggling to find words on a page that flowed well. Each day I would look at one of the pages back and front and try to come up with an idea. After 3 days, I had read through all the papers and hadn’t had a clue what I was going to do.

This all changed when I stopped looking at the assignment as a sort of puzzle, trying to fit pieces together to make up a big picture, but rather a journey, where you follow one word to another. Once I mentally made that decision, I had a much easier time finding the words on the page I wanted to use. From there, I knew exactly what I wanted to draw, a pathway. For one, this pathway symbolizes “her” journey in my story, but it also symbolizes the journey I took to string the words together on the page. From there I added other designs to the page to fill up some of the empty space and finally was able to conquer this assignment!

Fake Hunger

Student Posts

This assignment came in two parts. The first part was coming up with my poem. In order to do this I read through all of the pages I selected, and first chose the page I found most interesting. After deciding on that page I re-read it over and over again in order to craft my poem. I started by just circling a bunch of phrases and words I found interesting, until eventually I came up with my poem.

The second part was deciding what to draw in order to depict my poem. My poem is all about hunger but more importantly peoples situation and life, and how there is always someone out there that has it worse than you. I decided to draw two plates of food. One of them with a ton of food on it and the other very bare and with no protein, just a few peas and carrots.

For Her

Student Posts

Human Document

Not much planning involved before I decided the page and the words for my Human Document assignment. As a result, I was able to complete this in a relatively short time. I started off with a few interesting words and phrases and then selected the next ones that rhymed. I hope the text actually makes sense, but if not, at least it flows smoothly 🙂

Digitalizing the page before drawing saved me from a lot of trouble. It was easy to draw and make changes digitally. And there are plenty of tools on the iPad – all sizes and colors of pens and brushes  – to help me achieve different effects I desired.

Assignment Link: https://eng181f19.davidmorgen.org/assignments/sketches/sketch-8-human-document/

“Depend on you?”

Student Posts

For my human document I started by glancing over the page I had chosen and highlighting words that stood out using a colored pencil. I varied the color I used based on what emotions I felt the word elicited. Once I had a narrowed down set of words to work with, I went along boxing in the words I wanted to use in my poem, adding articles and punctuation when needed. As I went along, I used my pen to add illustrations that underlined the meaning of certain key words. I particularly like how I drew a silhouette of a man holding up the words “depend on,” and make his footing be on an unstable pile of bricks. I thought this signified the unreliability of the man in my poem. Last, I used white paint to cover the parts of the page that I didn’t want the audience to pay attention to, especially since some of the words I had originally highlighted but not used in my poem would have caused confusion. I enjoyed this project a lot because it gave me the opportunity to be really creative; however, I also found it very difficult and time consuming to choose the words to use in my poem, since so many were on the page for me to choose from.

my face.

Student Posts

my face.
got everything–all colors, all
types,
it looks the least bit unusual.

in bleach born.
all black and strange.
between lips, in eyes.
color,

dark and wild as any child
another way of calling me

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