My creative motivation was based on the idea that we learned about in class. While looking through Lynda Barry’s style of comics I was inspired by her work. According to McCloud, the definition of a comic is “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (McCloud pg 9). I believe that my comic fits this definition because I used many objects and pictures in a specific juxtaposition to tell the story of who I am. For example, I purposefully had the butterflies that I cut out of the image in the left corner in a path that brought the readers eye around the comic. Another thing that I tried to do was to try and have a specific point of focus so that the reader knew where to start. Therefore, I used the be creative in the top left area with a glitter back group so that the reader’s eye would be drawn there. Being creative is a really important part of who I am and so that is why I chose to make this my first focus point. I then used the cutout butterflies as a line for people to follow around who I am. The teabag that I used added a really interesting texture to the composition because you can see the leaves inside the bag. This is my favorite tea and it has quotes on the tag that is inspirational about nature. Another object that added a nice texture was my favorite scrunchy. I’ve had that scrunchy since high school and I have worn it or had it with me through a lot of challenging exams, sports events, and hospital visits. I like the way that it bunched up and you can see the individual folding in the fabric. The language that I used was words that I hand made on some graph paper. I think that this added character to my comic because it was something that I made myself and my faith is something that is really important to me.
I have used photoshop a lot in the past couple of years, however, this type of photoshop was pretty difficult for me to learn. Remembering all of the buttons to press in the right order was hard for me to remember. The tool that I thought was the most helpful was the edit in quick mask mode. This allowed me to cut out the parts of the big object that I wanted. Another thing that I used a lot was saving a selection. This was helpful when I was going from one composition to another. At first, the most confusing thing for me was actually copying and pasting the selected area into another document. However, after trying a couple of times I got the hang of it pretty quick. This was one of my favorite projects that I have had in any of my classes this semester. I love working to compose a document in a digital environment because I can do more interesting things than if I was making it by hand. I also really liked being able to use the things that are important to me and things that I made in a digital environment.