The comic that I created this week tells a simple and short story of a girl who is sound asleep deep in a peaceful, quiet dream when she is awoken by her loud and unsettling alarm clock.In the beginning frames, I wanted to portray the sense of silence and serenity that is usually invisible. I used soft strokes of a pencil to outline everything. I used lighter colors which I lightly pressed on the paper giving off a softer and quieter feel. The character was in a peaceful and pleasant dream where everything was still and silent besides the buzzing of butterflies and soft chirping of the birds flying in the wind. I wanted to add contrast in the 5th panel where the alarm clock went off, interrupting the quietness. I was trying to portray the invisible sense of irritating loud noise. It’s unpleasant, unsettling and deafening. I portrayed this sense by using sharp symbols that were colored with dark, loud colors. Even the panel itself is outlined sharply with a darker pen than the rest of the panels. I used brighter colors than those in the quiet panels as well.

I thought about using adobe illustrator for this comic, but I had a vision of this story and how I could portray usually invisible senses with the noise. The use of a softer pencil helped me outline the quiet panels along with soft, light colored pencils. I used a thicker black pen for the loud panel as that gives more of a strong feel which is what I was going for. I noticed that a ruler helps with creating the outline for panels and adding color can help make a comic tell a story far better than a black and white one can.

The reader/viewer of this comic must use closure between panels when switching from the character’s dream and real life with the alarm clock. Nothing is explicitly saying that they are two different settings, but when the reader uses aspect-to-aspect, they are understanding that the alarm clock is not actually inside of the dream due to the cues in the background and the separation of panels.

For our next comic, I am going to attempt to create something with adobe illustrator in effort to add a variety of different modes and styles to my comics.