My crop of a Lynda Barry page, talked about in the accompanied posting
- In my example, I feel Barry is saying that with childhood and playing, they’re not the same when we grow up and out of our younger years. We often will find ourselves thinking of happy times in the past and those happy times are really when we would simply play and have fun as a child. She states how there can be a “kind of amnesia” when it comes to how serious we took playing and I definitely can relate to that. One of my happiest memories from when I was a child was having Christmas in Hawaii and getting a toy truck that made all sorts of fantastic sounds. The memory to me always seemed happy but I never thought about particularly why up until now. I was happy largely due to the fact that I was playing with a brand new toy.
- I believe Barry created the pages of the book by handwriting on what looks to be lined yellow paper and painting/drawing in the details with markers and what looks to be water colors then probably scanning it into a computer and putting any finalizing touches before assembling it as a whole digitally. If you look closely at the lettering, letters of the same type (e.g. four different letter ‘Y’s) are all slightly different which gives me the suspicion that it is in fact not a typeset but simply careful handwriting. I feel this relates to her message of going back to the basics, the simple times, the fun, to truly find out more details about one’s self and she did that by creating this book using most likely simple art supplies that anyone can probably pick up at the nearest store. She didn’t use fancy pastels or textured paper but just the simple sketch tools of a bored child creating worlds and words out of mere thoughts and imagination.
Kristin Becker's DTC Classes at WSU 