I created my comic strongly from a creative perspective. I wanted to convey the idea of creativity, and how music can play a large part in that; both while listening to it, and while writing it. I used pieces of my shirts fabric to create the background, and used pieces of my handcrafted Zine and other artworks to create the text and other pieces of my comic.

My final digital comic collage I created in Photoshop.

While I enjoyed Scott McCloud’s work in “Understanding Comics,” I found myself inspired by the work of Lynda Barry’s “What It Is.” I wanted to both convey information as well as produce an aesthetic response from anyone who views it, so I chose to focus the majority of my time on making my collage materials work well together in a sequence.There were many different iterations of my comic with slight variations before I settled on this one, but I’m pleased with the way it turned out. There were a handful of points throughout the creation of my comic where I referenced John Lovett’s “Design Overview” to get an idea of what I should be doing in order to make my collage materials blend well. Aspects such as line, shape, and size were always a thought in the back of my mind as I laid out all the pieces of my collage in Photoshop. I also felt like I made good use of the texture aspect with all the hand-drawn materials I scanned in. The textual elements of my comic are half digital and half handcrafted. I created the text using the text tool in Photoshop, then using the text selection I applied them to a layer mask of my hand-drawn work, creating the final look. Overall, I feel like my materials and textures of my comic work well together, and I’m pleased with it as a whole.

While this was not my first time using Photoshop, I wouldn’t consider myself a pro by any means. The tutorials I watched to prepare for this project also introduced me to new aspects of Photoshop that I was unaware how to use before. One method that I struggled with at first, was that of layer masking. Initially I didn’t understand just how powerful they were, and always resorted to erasing pieces of my layers rather than masking them out, and painting over parts of my selection with the paint-brush tool was somewhat confusing. However once I understood how to use them, I was happy with what I was able to create. Overall I enjoyed composing in a digital environment, but it was somewhat daunting at times when I was having to learn new tools and methods.