Assignment 5: Rethinking and Realizing
The Brief:
The simple brief for this assignment is that you produce a body of work that explores a starting point of your own through different stages of development, materials and processes. What is not so simple is how you achieve this.
The important thing in this assignment is for you to think unconventionally. Your starting point could be a very open theme like working with a text, improving your drawing, ways to present your work or developing your photography. But you then need to think about mixing up sizes, shapes, forms and materials, and to do something you have never done before. In fact, it might be something no-one has ever done before!
We want you to enjoy the process without the hindrance of thinking whether what you are making is graphic design, photography, illustration or something else. You have the potential to redefine the boundaries of a subject, the overlaps and the forms of interdisciplinary practice. If illustration, for instance, looks the same as it does today in 50 years time, then the subject will be dead on its feet!
Visual thinking and making changes, so embrace the idea of the new, the unusual and the unconventional, and push at the boundaries of your subject. As you will know by now, learning your subject is just part of your training, learning how to question and think is what lies at the heart of creativity.
Several key points to help guide your assignment are:
● Your body of work will need to be a minimum of three finished pieces.
● If you are working in motion or sound, then a piece of work could be 30 seconds long.
● It’s important that you decide on the element of unconventionality, or creative risk that you are comfortable with, rather than trying to second-guess what your tutor may expect. Creative risk is about not knowing an end result, or giving up an element of control, or trying something new. It is not about putting yourself in danger to achieve something. Work safe.
● It may be the case that what you propose doing goes ‘wrong’. We would encourage you not to decide too quickly whether you like something or not.
● Document what you do as you go along, and if something doesn’t work out or goes ‘wrong’, you can use the images to produce a designed mini publication of your process. This way, the process can be a valid end result too.
● Still unsure what to do? How about incorporating an element of chance, participatory drawing, producing a set of instructions for family or friends to complete, art-directing your grandmother, using a material not associated with art or design, or finding a new way to collaborate with someone.
Remember that this part of the course should take 90 hours of your time. The practical, making part of the assignment could take 75 hours of this, or around 10 working days, plus around two days to record your making process and for critically reflecting on the work at the end in your learning log.
Choosing a topic
The focus I chose for the duration of this course revolved around sequential storytelling and comics. For this experimentation-oriented project, I wanted to explore digital comics and the forms they can take. In an effort to better understand the medium of comics, I made an effort to find how digital tools influence the visual storytelling style of comic books. The three I have chosen to experiment with in this section are: 1. The vertical scrolling style comic, 2. The horizontal flip-book style comic (also called the infinite comic style), 3. The web-based style with GIF animation.
Similar to the previous “When I heard the learn’d astronomer” project, I selected a very short poem to illustrate:
I Sang
by Carl Sandburg
I sang to you and the moon
But only the moon remembers.
I sang
O reckless free-hearted
free-throated rhythms,
Even the moon remembers them
And is kind to me.
“I Sang” by Carl Sandburg is barely seven lines of text long and has a very simple meaning. It’s a melancholy reflection on rejection, and like most of Sandburg’s poems it’s simple and rooted in reality. My interpretation of the text, however is not. The reason I chose this poem, besides its short length, was that the instant I read it my mind pushed the personification of the moon into the realm of the fantastical, creating a new story entirely. The poem then shifts from being about loneliness to being about sharing ourselves with people who see our value.
I always like to start by writing the text and breaking it down on paper if it’s short. Sometimes this is accompanied by thumbnails, sometimes it’s not.
Version 1: Vertical Style Comic
Each comic had to be designed individually because the format changes the way one physically reads the comic, and therefore the way it is drawn. Scrolling “Webtoon” comics are technically panel-by-panel and are arranged vertically. Because the scrolling format is usually viewed on a phone, the panels are also in a portrait format. Any image that would usually be composed in landscape has to be re-thought. I haven’t quite figured out how to make sweeping establishing shots. It was not too limiting in this instance, but would have been if the story was grander. The vertical style is very good for more intimate or character-heavy storytelling.
The style I chose for all the comics is more painterly than what is traditional for comics, mostly because this it was the speediest technique I know how to use whilst also remaining presentable. If I were to bring the project to full peak, I would workshop the style and the character designs more, and definitely add color.
As this is a project about digital comics, I also drew everything digitally (in Photoshop). Most of the process for each comic is filmed via screen recording below.
Thumbnailing and sketching
Refining
Result
The first version was my first try and not very readable. After receiving some feedback, I opted to separate the “panels” a little more in order to encourage clarity. There are some storytelling differences in the flip-book style and web-based style comics for the same reason. Making the first male character a musician muddled the meaning too much, so in the future versions I removed the flute so it would be clear that the point of view voice (who says “I sang”) is the girl.
Version 1
I uploaded the comic on Webtoon for a more “authentic” reading experience. Best viewed on mobile.
Version 2
Version 2: Flip-Book Style Comic
This style of digital comic has entirely the opposite language to the first. Instead of everything being in portrait, everything is in landscape. The scrolling style was continuous and each image flowed into the other as a tapestry, but in the flip-book style one has to think about the changing “panels” almost like an animation. The horizontal format allows for more breathing room in terms of establishing shots vs close ups because it is much more natural to halve up a horizontal page than a vertical one.
Working process
The trouble with digital comics is that one has to be careful with the presentation in order for the reading experience to work properly. In this instance, it is ideal for the comic to be posted on a site with a slider that doesn’t move the images on its own. I would even say it is crucial, because reader interaction with the images makes the reader a reader and not a viewer. Once the images move on their own, the comic is no longer a comic, but an animation no matter its format. The technical details of posting a web comic are just as important as details in typography when working with print. With some help from someone with more experience, we experimented with several available sliders until we found one that works for this project. The first version (simple slider) is not ideal because it flips on its own and has visible marker bubbles at the bottom. The second version (slider revolution) is much more serviceable, with no obstructions and without parts moving on their own.
Result:
Simple slider version:
Slider Revolution version:
Version 3: Web-Based Comic / GIF Comic
Here we enter the more multimedia side of digital comics. Of course, there are much more extreme examples out there with music and robust animation. I have limited myself to a traditional form of comic and augmented the pages with some moving panels. I maintain that a comic is not a comic if it moves entirely on its own, but here I believe that the integrity of the format is maintained because the moving panels are contained and only augment the experience without transforming the story-telling medium. If one selected a single frame of the GIFs and printed the pages, the comic would be entirely ordinary. What makes this a “web-based” comic is that one would need to read it on a blog or website (or perhaps an app, but that is a different story). In order to successfully combine the GIFs with the JPEGs, each “page” had to be assembled on the website itself, rather than uploaded fully-formed. Since I had already designed the story twice over, once in a predominantly vertical and the other in a predominantly horizontal format, I decided to save time by collaging some of the panels together to make a more traditional-looking comic.
Collaging and drawing
Experiment:
Before making the actual drawings, I used images already on the site to mock up a “page”. I experimented with the container styles and the margins until something resembling a page emerged.
GIFs
Once the pages were completed, I selected one panel from each and made GIF animations out of them.
Result:
