Digital Comics Collage, Peter Dowell, 2019

I didn’t really know how to go about making this comic when I first heard about the project, actually I was kind of intimidated by it. I have used Photoshop before and I do have a basic understanding of it, but I didn’t know how to express my creativity for the project by making it a comic. Another part of the project that I was nervous about was the scanning part of it. I had to test a couple of different materials and items before I knew what I was going to create until I came up with my final idea. I wanted the reader to see the randomness can be put in an order to look like something else.

I wanted to relate to Scott McCloud’s idea that people are selfish and they see themselves in most things, such as cars, wall outlets and two dots and a line. I wanted to convey that there are a bunch of random materials that I could scan and then put together to make a sort of human looking character. The idea that I can take a bunch of random things and put them in a particular order to show a human looking character is really interesting to me. That is why I put the text as “Are They Together” vs “They Are Together” to show that when they are together and all connected they can convey a human-like thing just as two dots and a line can convey a human like thing as well, but only when they are placed in a certain order. My comic fits Scott McCloud’s definition by the juxtaposition of the two images. On the left image we can see a bunch of images put in random order in random directions with the text saying “Are They Together” which in comparison the the next page when “They Are Together” it gives a direct image to compare to the first image when the random images are no longer random, but are connected deliberately. John Lovett’s reading helped me out because I wanted to express direction of the images. I made the images random directions on the left page so that it seems chaotic while the images put together on the right are more stable being put together and horizontal and vertical. I was looking at the shape of things when I was creating my collage because I wanted to see how the shapes would fit together. I made some shapes bigger and some shapes smaller, but in the end they all fit together and the images I used really just made it interesting to look at and made it random as well. If I were to take a bunch of completely different images and textures I would get a completely different character. Thinking of the character and fitting the pieces together helped me manage the process for my collage. I had the spatial mode in my comic because it was all about how the images looked when they were put together and how much space they took up and you can really compare the two spaces between the left and the right side to see what they actually look like in the space that they take up. The text also takes up space and is really interesting because it is in a kind of wrong order on the left, but on the right it is more deliberate and normal to someone that would read it.

I have used some Photoshop in the past, but it was a while back so I had to remember a lot of things. I really like the quick select tool and that is how I made most of my selections. Even though I used quick select I still had to soften up some of the selections I made with feathering and stroke, so that was interesting to see how I could manage my selections. The tutorials helped me remember a lot of stuff from the past such as layer masking and messing with the colors for the project. I found it difficult to figure out how much I wanted to change from the original image in the project when I was making my selections. I wanted the images to be just how I scanned them and did not want to change it because if I edited the image too much from the original it would not really be random enough for my idea. I would mostly take the selections and then transform them to certain shapes and sizes. It wasn’t really confusing. I feel like Photoshop is such a diverse tool and the thing that limits me is my creativity and not Photoshop.

I definitely enjoy working on a digital environment rather than using a pencil and paper for making a drawing. I like the extensive tools that the digital environment provides to use and it can even enhance stuff that is done in the real world. Overall digital environments are more diverse in the stuff that they can do and they are even coming to a point where it doesn’t look different from the real world drawings.