When the hand-drawn comic was initially assigned, I was very excited to start the project. It quickly became apparent to me that the comic was so open-ended and I began to feel stressed. I didn’t really know the definition of a comic, and what that entitled. Despite how minimal my hand-drawn comic is, I went through almost a dozen rough drafts before settling with this one.

When it comes to drawing realistic things, I become a little bit of a perfectionist. To counter this problem, I like to use pen to draw because it forces me to accept any flaws that I would typically erase if I was drawing in pencil. A hand-drawn comic shows more of an artist’s character and thoughts, every part of the drawings are created by them and I find that hand-drawn comics to be more personal. One of the downsides to hand-drawn comics is that it’s difficult to share them on a large scale.

For the digital comic, I drew it with a stylus in the Autodesk Sketchbook application on my Surface laptop.

I used the geometric shape tool to create the grid and then I hand drew the rest with the pencil and paintbrush options. In this comic, I wanted to just display activities that I enjoy so I omitted most words. One of the benefits of digital comics is that you can use more sources such as images from online or different colored paints. One of the drawbacks to digital comics is that if you exclusively use images from online in your comics, there can be a lack of originality and creativity in the visuals.

While reading the first chapter of Scott McCloud’s “Understanding Comics”, I was fascinated by the idea that comics don’t require words or text. I decided to implement that in my digital comic by omitting most text.