For my comic I chose to put items together in which were parts of my college experience so far. I believe my collage comic fits into Scott McCloud’s description of what a comic is because though my work I am telling a story of how my life at college has been. One inspiration I used for my project was Linda Barry. I thought her work with lined legal paper was stunning. However, to fit my theme more properly I scanned a piece of spiral notebook paper that I had ripped and crumpled up. Crumpling up the paper gives it a 3D aspect and is visually more interesting. In addition to this piece of paper I added layers of newspaper clippings on top in photoshop. The placement of these papers put my comic in linguistic mode. However I kept visual mode as well when I placed them as if you read them like a normal page, left to right and top to bottom. I even put another layer with a different clipping that repeated the use of the word “money” to emphasize it. 

This was not my first time using photoshop as I had used it briefly in a course before. However, I believe after watching the tutorials I know much more about how to use the program than I ever did before. The most useful thing I learned from the tutorials was selective subject. I found it was very easy to take my digital scans and click the button to select what I wanted and get rid of the background. Although I mostly was impressed with the selective subject I also thought that learning about all the other options I had for selecting was very helpful when creating my project. At the beginning of my project I was able to get these selections but I had trouble figuring out how to move, rotate, or scale them. Quickly though I was able to learn and could piece together my image. I enjoy working in a digital environment because of the alterations that can be made to an image without harming the original photo. This was seen in the “Try Out Simple Selection Tools” tutorial and I thought it was very interesting. I know I will keep using photoshop throughout my life so I am glad to learn it so early on.