After viewing the Northwest Alternative Comics, I saw numerous unique artists that all expressed their comics in different ways. Mita Mahato’s art stood out the most to me. She used several design elements along with design principles to help convey her message in her short comic. I will discuss her comic Unidentified Feeling Object. Although it was short, Mahato was able to use several design elements and design principles to contribute to the piece. For example, she used lines to help the reader know where to read. This can be seen in her second and third pages as the second page shows the spaceship pulling a heart that goes from left to right, whereas the third page uses lines to show the path of the falling heart. She also uses color to contrast the darker background and spaceship to the bright red heart and the adventure that the heart takes. This catches the readers eye due to the contrast in color. With that said, the reader is also pulled to look at the spaceship for its unique texture, newspaper, which is unlike that of the background or heart. All these design elements are seen in the image, but they are not the only ones she used.

Mahato also used design principles to help bring her piece together. She used repetition of the same scene with slight adjustments to allow the reader to truly focus in on the scene almost as if the cartoon was a few frames from a stop motion film, which is seen both on the second and third page. Furthermore, she used gradation to represent depth, on the third page, thereby illustrating how the heart is falling further down and even goes out of the frame. This shows dominance as the heart is not only a contrasting color, but it also goes out of the frame which emphasizes its importance.

Another thing that Mahato does is that she causes the reader to question time. This is seen in the third page as it seems like Mahato wants the reader to look at the image as a whole, but she wants you to follow the heart. I think this as by looking at the image as a whole, you can see the trees growing up into the sky. As per closure, it seems like there is a lot of aspect to aspect with the image continuing onto another frame which shows a continuation of the image.

Overall, Mita Mahato uses several design elements, design principles, closure, and time frame in her short cartoon. These pieces all come together to make the whole piece come together as one.