Kristin Becker's DTC Classes at WSU

While creating a hand drawn comic and a digital comic, I noticed that each way had its positives as well as negatives.

My hand drawn comic consists of information about myself including where I was born and my hobbies. I divided some of my favorite hobbies into panels with some text making it easy for the reader to understand the comic as well as get to know a little bit about me. When drawing on paper with a pencil I feel as if I have total control of what I am drawing, and it is easy to add details to an image. I found myself having to erase quite a bit when drawing giving the finished comic a not so clean look.

For my digital comic I recreated my hand drawn comic in Adobe Photoshop. I used a mouse to draw instead of my hand, and it resulted in me feeling as if I had less control of what I was drawing. Creating the digital comic was easy and less time consuming than drawing the comic with the assistance of tools in Photoshop that helped me create straight lines, shapes, resize elements and duplicate layers. After creating the comic digitally, the comic had a clean look and very simplistic compared to the hand drawn version.

My first draft of the hand drawn comic did not have any words, leaving the comic up for interpretation of the reader. I could understand the comic, but I felt as if the comic wasn’t complete and needed another element. After reading the first chapter on Scott McCloud I noticed that comics that do not use words can have many different interpretations between the readers. I wanted to make my comic easier to understand so I added a few words in each panel that explains the reason for each drawing. I felt that adding myself in addition with the words in each panel gave the comic a complete look.

I found the hand drawn comic the most challenging as I’m not a great artist when it comes to drawing things by hand. Keeping lines straight and drawing things that are going to be identifiable to other people poses difficulty but I think I conveyed what I was trying to say as it was pretty straightforward and simple especially with the text.

The digital comic was definitely easier for me as I just find it easier to work on a digital interface. I used Microsoft paint which is somewhat limiting in what you can do. I was able to easily add colors to it which made it pop more than the hand drawn comic. I’m still not the best at drawing even digitally so it didn’t come out the best but I think I prefer it to the hand drawn one still.

I think between the two the digital one added much more room for creativity as there are so many tools that can be used on the computer to create images that you can’t easily reproduce with pencil and paper. It just feels more efficient and easy to work on a digital workspace where you aren’t wasting paper and if you make a mistake you can easily undo it. They both essentially tell the same simple story but in different ways. The hand drawn relies on the text more and the digital relies more on the art.

Hand Drawn Comic by Trent Madison.

Drawing the comic by hand for the first assignment was a bit challenging for me because i was unsure what to even draw that would tell something about myself, so i drew a comic that was about my major and a little bit about what i like. Now knowing the definition of what a comic is, i realized that my hand drawn comic was a comic strip and that i could have given the information without the boxes around every scene. The benefits of drawing a comic is that it can be done fairly quick. Drawbacks would be that the quality of my hand drawn work is not very good.

The struggle of everyday life of a student is illustrated through a comic made by Trent Madison.

The digital comic that i made shows what life can be like some days. I focused on something i can relate to versus who i literally am. The process of creating the digital comic took way longer to do because I used Illustrator to create a person using tons of smaller parts. The Benefits of using the program are that I was able to create a person that actually looks somewhat like a human. The Drawbacks would be how much more time and effort it takes to make just one thing if its detailed.

Reading a comic on paper can be dull if there is no color used to bring out the visual element of what a comic is, as opposed to reading a comic on a screen that is full of color and has cleaner lines.

Reading Scott McCloud’s first chapter inspired me to think about simplistic sequential art. By reading my comic left to right, you can assume that its starting on the left side, and as it goes to the right time passes, creating an order to the three events. I also used space in between each different occurrence so that it would get treated like time would for a movie or show.

Hey y’all. I am so happy to be a part of this little community. Let’s dive into it.

Starting off with a hand-drawn comic was an excellent way to ease me into this course. I am not an artist – I prefer to doodle and make small stick figures, so I stuck with what I knew, and did that for this first assignment. It was an enjoyable experience; I am one of those oldie English majors who love print books, and pens with paper. I enjoyed the feel of creating my comic through the artistic strokes of each small box, and I love the way the stark black ink looks on paper in general, so that was an added bonus for aesthetic pleasure. I think the only drawback that I can think of for a hand-drawn comic is that when I would mess up – because it was in pen – I would have to start all over, and I was not a fan of that. I am also a perfectionist at heart, so drawing and messing up is not an option for me. I tried to just roll with it, but once I saw the imperfection, I had to start over, therefore costing me a lot of time. I would say time was also a major drawback on not only this one, but on the computer generated comic as well.

When I created my second comic, I again chose to stick with what I knew, and use simple shapes to create stick figures. This time, however, I got to experiment with color and repetitiveness in the comic with other figures, as well as myself. When you hand draw things, most of the time it is a challenge to duplicate the same item in the same way or fashion. Having the ability to copy and paste was a huge time savor, but I still had to focus on the small details, such as proportions of figures, stacking shapes, and using a consistent two or three fonts throughout the comic, to add some aesthetics to the comic. I would say that I struggled on the computer more than with a pen, however, because I am not used to any form of generating images on technology, so that was a challenge. I also wasn’t a fan of reading the comic online – again, I prefer pen and paper, so I got a different feel when I read the comic on the screen versus when I printed it off and read it. Sometimes doodles and paper can outweigh gorgeous pieces of artwork crafted on the computer, simply because of the feeling and the personalization that each piece of paper can bring to someone. I would describe it as the difference between a written note saying thank you, and an email.

As for the reading, I actually decided to do it after, just to see what I could come up with on my own, with no influence. Though McCloud made some excellent points that I definitely bookmarked, I don’t think he would have made too much of an influence on my comic, even if I read it before creating it. Just my personal opinion, however.

My comics – both hand-drawn and computer generated – are below. Feel free to look at them, and I apologize in advance if you can’t read them. My handwriting, and therefore my font, is extra tiny.

Writing a print comic followed by a digital one was an interesting experience, I didn’t find making the print comic at all difficult despite repetitively drawing the same character multiple times and keeping my hand writing at a steady font. The digital comic was still much easier to design and create, having tools where I could produce straight lines instantly, drop color into shapes rather than manually coloring, and being able to type my speech bubbles were all massive bonuses. My favorite part of moving to digital was definitely the ability to copy a character and just manipulate the expression rather than having to manually redraw like I would need to if I was hand drawing the comic. I used the drawing app Procreate to draw my digital comic and had used it a moderate amount before so I had some ideas on how to use the tools and layers. 

I find reading paper comics to be my preferred way of enjoying them. I find that digital comics don’t have the same feel as paper ones do. If I were to be purely creating comics I would want it all to be digital but if I were to only read them I would want the paper formats over the digital ones. 

The Scott McCloud reading did not have to major of an effect on the concept of my digital comic.I did the reading before I had a concept for my comic and hoped the McCloud comic would inspire something but still had nothing at the end of the chapter. I returned to finish my comic a few hours later once I had an idea and the McCloud comic was still not impactful. 

Drawn by Rachel Fox, January 2020 

Drawn by Rachel Fox, January 2020