For my comic, I wanted it to feature things that meant a lot to me but were able to be scannable on the flatbed scanners in the CDSC. I found myself grabbing these small items that have a small story associated with them. All of these items are small images, that depict an event, an item, or a characteristic about me that only my close friends would truly understand. With these items, context is everything. I didn’t want to tell a story about each individual item on the page, that would’ve taken too long. Also, it wouldn’t have made much sense in the end. I wanted to make the comic about items like these in general. Everyone has small trinkets of sentimental value and if someone asked, they’d probably be able to go into great detail about each one—each story. I followed this idea and realized that all of these items are gifts, or a depiction of gifts, that were given to me. Even though we have a lot more we could find and use, each of these can be seen as a representation for how our closest friends perceive us.

A majority of my time spent on this comic was actually spent coming up with my idea/concept for what I wanted to communicate. Photoshop is actually the program that I am most comfortable/familiar with out of all of the Adobe CC programs. To cut out the items from the scanned images, I relied heavily on the Object Selection, Polygonal Lasso, Quick Selection, and Magic Wand Tools. For more square objects and items that have clearly defined lines, I was able to save a lot of time by using the Object Selection Tool to select a majority of the item, and then refining the selection by using the Quick Selection Tool with a small-sized brush.

To make the Text Boxes contrast a bit more from the background, I added a really subtle drop shadow effect and turned down the opacity of the effect. This helped the boxes match the image shadows caused by the scanning process.

For my major, I have to create a lot of projects on a digital platform, however, I draw my drafts out on paper before starting my projects. They both serve very important roles in the creative process. Sketching out my ideas with paper and pencil can help me visualize my ideas faster before beginning the digital design aspect.