For our first homework, I used an image of three kids dressed up. One of the first challenges I faced was how to use the photo without making it the main focus of the piece and I decided to use a collage style with different overlapping parts. Primary colors remind me of childhood and making art as a kid so I used squares of red, blue, and yellow to overlay the image. I experimented with different color effects that gave the squares texture. To make my character, I was inspired by the costumes of the children in the picture. I experimented with a dotted screentones brush. I also wanted to incorporate the people in the photo into my character to make the piece flow together better and I traced the characters and placed them into the arm/hand of my character to make it seem like they were standing on the hand and riding their bike down the character’s arm. I wanted the piece to feel childlike and playful with exaggerated texture and disproportionate body parts like the very large hand.
Single Panel Comic + Post-it Note Idea Generation My single panel comic started off with generating ideas from our in-class exercise with post-it notes and writing/drawing different timed prompts like “write a catch phrase” and “draw something glamorous”. I found this method of idea generation really fun and I’ll probably use it again in the future. It helps to not overthink when starting a project and can lead to very unexpected results. I mashed a couple of drawings together for my single panel like the legs with shoes, the angry man, and the alligator. I wanted to create a collage-like piece with overlapping drawings and text. When making this project I didn’t plan or think it through prior and just started drawing to see what came out. I wanted the sketches to be rough and look kind of unfinished and tied that in with a list of to-do items with check marks in the background. My final step was creating a clock-like border to tie into the “Clock is slow” text. I had a lot of fun with this project and enjoyed letting the project become what it wanted to be without overthinking it.
Head Standing and No Shoes?? When looking through my finished works from this semester I realized there were a couple projects where I had people standing on top of another living character like in Homework one with the children standing on the hand, the angry man on the alligator, or the man holding the dogs. I also noticed that in the two latter pieces I drew the characters without shoes. I hadn’t noticed that these were common themes in my art, but I think it’s my way of creating humor or shock. I think it’s fun to overlap unrealistic scenarios such as a man standing on an alligator with no shoes or a balancing act on top of a girl’s head.
4 PANEL COMIC
For my four panel comic I wanted to experiment with a new technique and mimicked Ivan Brunetti’s style of comic making. I used simple shapes to create character and emotion. This project made me realize that you can express many different feelings with just simple dots and lines and emotion does not always have to be portrayed with a lot of line work. For example, my character was able to portray having an idea with a simple eyebrow raise and arm twist. I enjoyed this more simplistic style of digital art and found that creating a world with few shapes can be challenging. When creating the last slide I found it hard to create unique characters using the same shapes and lines.
Using References
For my final project I wanted to try something out of my comfort zone. I experimented with drawing a horse figure which I soon realized was extremely difficult to do off of memory. I had also never drawn horses before, especially not horses on the toilet or brushing their teeth. After many trials and failures of drawing a proportionate horse figure sitting on the toilet I switched to using picture references. I pulled images into Photoshop and traced different parts of the image. I found this new technique very rewarding and used it to create most of the panels in my 8 panel comic. Using references allowed me to focus more on creating the scenes instead of getting frustrated over perfecting
Color Sampling
To choose the color scheme for my eight panel comic, I explored Adobe color. I like using this website for inspiration because there’s so many palettes to experiment with. I haven’t used super contrasted colors in any of the projects I made this semester so it was a little bit of a challenge for me to make all the colors work together. I had to make the muted colors of the horse work with the bright colors of the background. I had a lot of fun working with higher contrast.
I sampled colors from a bright summer camp art piece by German Gonzalez Ramirez.
The bubble bath panel was the very last panel I did for this project because I was very intimidated by the thought of making bubbles and making a bath that looked accurate. I looked up a couple tutorials and made some pink bubbles on Photoshop that I repeated throughout the bathtub and extending out of the frame. I made the bubbles using the Elliptical Marquee tool, the paintbrush, and selection tool for highlights to make them semi-realistic.
Although my eight panel comic was the most work, I’m proud of how the horse figure and story line turned out. My favorite panel is probably the horse brushing his teeth, but I do think there could be more in the background. I’m glad that I decided to challenge myself with a new technique from my previous projects and found that I liked both the process and finished product.