For my digital comic collage, I was inspired by Lynda Barry’s work in her book, she made each page feel almost chaotic, a mess of different words and pages in the background to still convey an idea. I tried to fit Scott McCloud’s definition of comic by covering the text and notebooks back onto itself until I made something a little chaotic. In the middle of the chaos that was school work and notes is my jacket, and all the things I need in my pocket falling into a void. In order to create more meaning in my comic, I used scanned the things that mean the most to me, the things in my pockets. I wanted to model my collage after Lynda Barry’s work, that was my greatest inspiration on how I created this. I felt that by layering different samples of my writing and school work, especially the most flashy ones, it could create that jumbled feel and make the center of the comic feel different because it was the only place where it wasn’t covered in notebook paper and homework.

This wasn’t my first time using Photoshop, I’ve had design classes in the past and I learned some interesting tricks in those classes in applications like these. That being said, it has been many years since I’ve worked in this environment, so I am still a little rusty. The fanciest trick I was able to pull off in this project was making my phone and wallet actually come out of my jacket pocket, giving the effect that they were inside my jacket. Other than that I used a couple clipping masks, some layer merging and duplicating, and a lot of pixel by pixel erasing to make sure my selections were cut out and shaped just the way I wanted them. I had to play around with how I wanted everything to fit on the page a lot, moving the order of things being displayed dozen of times until I felt it looked a little like Barry’s drawings in her book.

I definitely like composing in a digital environment, its easier for me to learn to create better art in a digital environment than practicing for years on pencil and paper.