This is my final for the digital comic collage. It shows a group of people going on an adventure. Created by Kristine Zorn, September 2019

I went with the more traditional idea of what people think when they hear the work comic, meaning that I organized my comic into panels. I would say my comic fits Scott McCloud’s definition because it is composed of a series of images placed in a specific order and when those images are read/looked at in that order they convey the story of a group of people going on an adventure. One element of design I used would be direction. While most of the panels are read and drawn in a horizontal and vertical fashion, there are two panels that I drew as triangles. The triangles introduce diagonal lines and direction into comic. Since diagonal direction tends to represent movement and action it made sense to use it for the panels where the battle is taking place. Even though the second to last panel is once again a rectangle there is still an implied diagonal line in the way Erza’s (the red-haired girl) body is placed as she goes in for the final attack.

I think one of my favorite textures was the scales from my glasses case. Even though the dragon in my comic is drawn in a very 2D way with no shading the scales help give it texture and drive home that it is, in fact, a dragon. The scales in a way replace the shading to give the viewer the ability to imagine the dragon as a 3D object. The text I chose has perhaps a bit more of a smooth or curly style. When I think of adventures and the type of text I might see in them, it tends to be very fancy or similar to cursive. Cursive would have made the comic more difficult to read but the text I chose still has a similar feel to it as cursive does while still being easy to read.

This was not my first time using Photoshop. I used it extensively last year in DTC classes and I had used it a few times before that. Before I used Photoshop, I had used other very similar resolution-based programs for a few years for digital illustration/painting, so I have a fairly strong understanding of the basics in Photoshop. Since I use Photoshop more for digital painting and not photo editing one new thing I learned in the tutorials was how to fix color cast which did come in handy for one of my objects in my comic collage. I had used most of the selection tools before but had never explored Select and Mask. Select and Mask was very useful when I was cutting out the characters from the background because they had detailed complicated edges compared to my other scans and images.

While collage is not my thing, in general I enjoy composing digitally. As I said earlier, I love to do digital painting. In particular, I like how I can paint with color digitally. I still prefer to draw and sketch traditionally, but I like how digital color typically looks compared to traditional color. Often it is also easier to fix mistakes digitally than it is traditionally at least for me.