I Need My Coffee by Kylie Michael

Made May of 2020

As I make my last comic I can’t help but reflect on my whole first year at WSU. I wanted to tell something about me that I hadn’t shared in this class before. I have made comics about how I bake and how I was on the WSU rowing team. I hadn’t yet shared my addiction to coffee. I have always liked coffee, but this year at college it became more of a necessity than ever before. I wanted to tell the story of how I wake up in the morning. I wake up and I can’t function without some coffee. I like to take my time waking up and drinking coffee before getting ready for the day.

My idea behind this was to portray what it is like in my world to wake up in the morning. I can’t fully wake up until I have had my caffeine. On the rowing team we have practice at 6am, so I had to get up and go workout without coffee. I would get back after practice and then have coffee and start getting ready for school. My whole purpose was for others to see how I wake up in the morning.

I chose to challenge myself by creating my comic in Illustrator. I had used it once before last semester, so I wasn’t very good at it. I had to take my time and mess with the tools to see how they work and to get them to create what I wanted them too. I kept the design and color pretty simple. I added boxes to show each frame to give it a bit of the general comic look.

I used pictures and words to create the full meaning of my comic. If the words weren’t there you may not be able to get the emotion I wanted it to tell. The words guide the reader to understand and the pictures give the reader a visual. They work together to give the comic the whole story. As for the structure of my comic, I kept it simple. I was using a new platform so I couldn’t add to much detail. I took my time on the small details to keep it looking clean, but didn’t add too much detail.

I was able to mess with the tools in order to create my final piece. I used the pen tool for most of it. I would add the curves in and then adjust the size. As soon as I like the way it looked I would group it all together. The groups helped keep all the work in the same spot, so if I needed to change things I could get to the right layer and not change everything. I also had trouble with the coloring. I had many different layers going one, so when I wanted to add color it made it a bit more difficult. I ended up using the paint brush to shade most of it.

This was a whole new program for me to use and I had my ups and downs. Overall, I found ways for things to work. I am sure if I watched a couple more videos I could learn a faster, neater way to do it, but overall I am impressed with the way it turned out. If I was drawing by hand I would have added more detail, but it would be as uniform as using Illustrator.

This class has opened my eyes to a new form of art work and I really hope to continue to expand my knowledge on it. My final piece for this class really does show how my first year of college went. It was all a learning process. Not only did I have to learn in my classes, but I also had to learn how to do everything myself. Things may not always go as planned, but we are meant to learn from them. This comic on the surface is a demonstration of how I wake up, but to me it shows way more than that. I have really enjoyed getting to read and create comics this semester.