Final Poster Comic by Ruby Pitts-Cranston

For my poster comic I show a scene taking place in front of a building. The timeline of the comic moves in a circle, so you could look anywhere in the comic and you’ll be able to follow along. The general storyline though is of a person taking a picture, they then give the picture to another person nearby, and when that person holds the photo up it shows the original person taking the picture. I chose this because I wanted to have frames in the comic that sort of showed two different things happening at the same time. I like the way that I showed passage of time because I feel that its still fairly easy to understand, but isn’t the same order that we read most things in. There are four frames in the comic besides the background. The type of closure that I used was action to action for the most part, the whole scene sort of overlaps but the frames themselves are in an action to action sequence, where each thing happens right after the other in a loop. I didn’t use any text or dialogue in the comic because I didn’t feel like it was needed. I was originally going to put the word cafe above the door of the building though. This was my first time using illustrator and I found it fairly difficult. Im very used to photoshop so it was confusing to use a program that looked so visually similar, and had many of the same tools, but was completely different. There were a couple of small things that I missed too when using illustrator, but realized that I had messed up on one I printed. For example a couple of the frames have different sized outlines, and on the lower middle Frame the persons hair is two slightly different colors (I’m still not sure how that happened). There were also a lot of things that I am normally able to do in photoshop but wasn’t able to do in illustrator, and the tools were a bit more confusing for me in comparison. For example I wanted to be able to merge shapes onto a single layer but I wasn’t able to easily do that. Some of these limitations made it difficult for me to make the comic look the way that I wanted to, and that affected the methods I used and the overall look of the final version. I would have liked to have better looking people in the comic, but a lot of the tools were difficult for me so I ended up using fairly basic shapes to make things. I think the most useful tool for me was the live paint tool. This allowed me to draw shapes and then fill them in with a solid color. The shapes were fairly limited so this gave me the ability to make the hands and the peoples hair. I found this project to be more difficult than the photoshop collage because of my lack of experience, but I still had fun and learned the basics if illustrator.