Kristin Becker's DTC Classes at WSU

Raina Telgemeire’s comic “Smile”

For this post I really wanted to use an image from the comic Smile by Raina Telgemeire that I read earlier in the semester. After reading the chapter I thought this was a pretty good example of the use of time and motion. Time and motion were said to be two closely related principals. It was said that motion is a type of change and that change takes place in time. This motion can also be implied or literal, meaning that an object can actually move or just look like it has moved. There are also alternative modes of change which are scale, transparency, color, layer and more. By changing one of these modes you could create the appearance of motion. Along with these, the use of scale, cropping, repetition, overlap, rotation and shape help with the visual appearance of movements in two dimensional works.

In this comic you can see the that each of the frames have their own sort of “zooming” appearance. By cropping the image so that the people are closer or farther it looks as if they are moving the camera view closer or further away. Specifically in the last frame the man’s arm is the only thing there. By cropping the rest of his body out it appears as if his arm is zooming into the frame and furthering the “shoving” motion that is happening. A similar effect is happening in the second to last frame as well. By having the doctors hand in the corner and appropriately scaled to fit near the girls face it looks as if he is inching his way closer to her face. I think that the only other element really present here is the use of shapes and words in order to portray movement. In many of the frames you can see little dashes or lines that run along the path of moving objects such as the doctors arm. By including little details like this and following the path that the object is traveling it makes it really look like and indicate that the characters are moving. My favorite example of this is the last frame of the girl getting the dental equipment shoved into her mouth. It was this exact frame of movement that made me want to look at this comic again and use it as an example.

Page 125 from Lynda Barry’s graphic novel “What it is.”

When looking at this page from the graphic novel “What it is” I can spot the movement of the characters at the bottom. I am able to see their movement as the characters wrap around the text. There is a repetition used when it comes to the rotation of the characters; I can tell that they are all rotating clockwise. Then if I glance at the bottom ghost-like character I am able to tell that it is cropped out from the rest of the graphics done on this page. This is due to the shape around the character that overlaps the background of the other ghosts. Yet, because this character is in a shape that surrounds it, I can tell that it holds importance. The importance is noticed when the character stands out at the bottom of the page. Especially because compare to the other similar ghost, this one is framed to make it seem that it’s separate. The shape surrounding this bottom ghost also makes it feel like it is floating. Then I would also describe that the other two characters that are floating around the middle text appear as if they are moving because of the overlap they have on the background. The background seems it has repeated lines going the same direction, creating the effect of wind. This effect allows me to assume that the ghost like characters are moving along with the wind that is drawn. The page from the graphic novel that I chose helps me see what the quote states “Motion can be implied” if you look at the formatting done and the overall structure.

Time and motion are very important aspects of graphic design, as they convey temporal change in both still and time based media. In the graphic memoir Smile by Raina Telgemeier, the author does a good job of illustrating implied motion within her still based frames. One way she was able to do so was by drawing her figures diagonally, rather than statically and centered with its edges parallel to the frame to show that something is progressing forward. The image also uses points and lines to highlight that there is in fact a motion occuring with in the scene. For instance, the girl jumping out from the vehicle is surrounded by a series of lines beneath her feet to evoke the movement. Each action is assigned a different graphic element to support the implied motion that takes place. Shapes are also used to show that these images are above the ground in the air moving forward by the use of shadows. Cropping can also help to illustrate motion, and in this example, the cropped arm in the bottom frame shows that the image is suppose to be far behind, and since we can just see her arm reaching out for only part of another image, we can observe implied motion.

Smile, Raina Telgemeier

Hajime, Isayama. “Attack on Titan.” Bunkyō, Tokyo: Kodansha, 2009. Print.

In this scene from the comic book (or manga) “Attack on Titan”, this titan is seen grabbing this horse and pulling him from off the ground. We all have relative knowledge about how large or small everyday animals or objects are that we have in our mind, and when we see it compared to another unfamiliar object we can gauge the size more accurately. In this case, we can see the titan is gigantic because of how he towers over the horse. The perspective also contributes to making this creature look giant. In Graphic Design The New Basics, the author discusses how when a designer prints off their work, they are often disappointed with the outcome compared to how it looked when designing it on the computer itself. I definitely related to this, after I’ve made a few fliers for Cable 8 here at WSU and various other works that were meant to be scaled down and printed on smaller pieces of paper, after seeing them larger on the screen of my laptop the results were disappointing sometimes, or some images or aspects didn’t look as clear when they were printed at a smaller size that what I saw while designing it. It’s definitely something good to keep in mind.