Glass Half Full, created by Bailey Tompkins, December 3rd 2019, WSU DTC 201, Project 3 – Web Comic

I was inspired to make a GIF after viewing Eroyn Franklin’s comic called “Long-Term Relationship”. I was interested in making a GIF because I felt that it fully utilized the concept of web viewing. GIF’s are unique because of their movement within the animation that otherwise couldn’t be viewed if not on the web. With GIF’s being limited to web viewing, I saw this as a perfect opportunity for this project. I followed a similar layout to Franklin by creating a GIF that has a start to finish that forever repeats. This allowed me to guide my viewer by making them feel like there wasn’t a rapid change between the beginning and end of the gif. I tried to ease the transition by slowly emptying the amount of juice in the glass and adding the juice back to the pitcher to create a subtle change before the gif restarted. I expect that the viewer will interact with my work by being able to view the entire GIF in one frame. I guided them to view the GIF this way by creating an orange frame around the GIF, similar to the backgrounds the Franklin uses her comic “Bikram Addict”. I found that my entire comic can be viewed without having to scroll or adjust the screen even if the reader is viewing on a desktop, laptop, or mobile device.

I believe Scott McCloud would agree that my work follows the elements of a comic. As McCloud defines a comic as images in deliberate sequence that convey information, my web comic combines the use of many pictures created from illustrator that are merged into a GIF on Photoshop to portray a pitcher of juice being poured into a glass. The deeper meaning behind this comic is to look at the glass half full rather than half empty and because the GIF is forever repeating, there will always be more juice, a metaphor for happiness, to fill your glass, a metaphor for one’s life, with. Therefore, just because the glass isn’t quite full right now, there is plenty of juice out there to fill it with.

As explained, I utilized both Illustrator and Photoshop to complete this assignment. I first made a series of jpgs from Illustrator by hand creating the figures shown on the GIF. I made the series of images by making small adjustment between each image to complete a final sequence of the glass being empty to being poured and emptied again. I then applied Photoshop by uploading the nine images created in Illustrator into Photoshop and creating a frame animation. In Photoshop I was then able to make each image its own frame and put them into chronologic order to create a time lapse animation. I then saved this as a GIF as my final web comic.

I uploaded my web comic on WordPress by using the class blog. Although the class blog has many limitations, I found that I was very satisfied with the viewing of my comic because of the frame I had previously created around the animation. Within WordPress my viewer can see the comic in one frame without having to adjust the screen or scroll therefore there was no need for me to make other accommodations for posting my comic elsewhere. I spent quite a bit of time deciding if I wanted to add a caption to the media or not, but I finally decided on adding a quote as a header to the GIF as well as a title to my overall post. I am very satisfied with my uploading experience to WordPress and found that the limitations didn’t affect me as much as I expected. I was able to upload my GIF file with no complications by simply adding it to the media and selecting “full size”.

Throughout the time of this final project, I not only significantly improved my skills within illustrator but I learned how to employ animated GIFs within Photoshop. Before this project, I never considered how GIFs are made or that it was even possible to make your own so easily, but by watching a few tutorials, I was able to utilize this feature on Photoshop that I didn’t even know existed. I really enjoyed learning how to use make my own GIF and now that I know how to do so, I will definitely be utilizing this feature in the future.

*Link To Blog Post of Final Comic

My Webcomic: https://madisonroby.wixsite.com/webcomic

My Process and Inspiration

In my own personal experience, I have preferred screen reading over physical reading in the realm of comics due to things like intractability, color quality, and the ability to easily take and view things wherever I go. Using a website like Wix over, maybe, WordPress allowed me to be more free in how I placed my images and gifs, meaning that I could better control how my readers would interact with the work that I created; while this is true, there were still some limitations to using this rather than HTML, for instance, I had some difficulty lining things up exactly, as the website’s auto alignment would sometimes not let me move things how I wanted them. With these in mind, I decided to go the linear route and simply make mu comic a top to bottom read, inspired by traditional comics as well as a lot of “endless scrolling” webcomics.

Panel 4 of my webcomic, “Be Still.” 2019.

Given this, the comic is relatively easy to navigate and be guided through, minus some longer panels where it may require the reader to scroll back some to read the panels beside it (see panel 4 of my webcomic). Along with this, there are gifs in my comic that require the reader to linger on them for a moment before continuing, my primary way of interacting with the reader. The other way I hoped to interact with them was through using simple characterization in order to allow them to better relate to the character I have created, as McCloud stated. Other than the simple iconography, looking at who is going to read my comic (primarily the people in this class) I chose a familiar theme pertaining to this particular time of the year: finals.

In the creation of my comic, using Wix allowed me to change how my comic is read on both laptops and phones, while that excludes tablets, I assume they would behave similarly to a phone. Since my comic is top down, it gets easily resized no matter what device is being used. A slight formatting problem that I had was, as stated above, panel 4 being long and having to scroll back some to view the next panel, however, on phones, that isn’t a potential issue.

While there are moving images and he considers comics to be pictures instead, McCloud himself embraced the use of gifs in some of his own webcomics which leads me to believe mine would still be considered a comic. I used simple iconography to better relate to the reader which, in my opinion, seems to have worked decently well, the character being somewhat anonymous in terms of looks.

My Experience Creating the Comic

For this comic, I wanted to include textures and movement, meaning that Photoshop was the best choice. The variety of brushes allowed me to create the feeling I was going for, using mainly charcoal type brushes. Illustrator, in my opinion, is better for creating smoother graphics, reminding me more like smooth plastic or metal compared to Photoshop where I can create something rougher and darker. Alongside this, using the timeline feature in Photoshop allowed me to create video or frame timelines and create gifs; I ended up using video timelines solely, as I didn’t feel as comfortable with the frame by frame timeline and not being able to move and time things in the same way. It was a learning curve figuring out how to use the timelines alongside making the transition between layers smooth in panel 8 (as panel 16 is meant to not be smooth in motion).

Panel 8 of my webcomic, “Be Still.” 2019.

In order to share my comic, I saved all my panels as individual JPEG files and uploaded them to a Wix site that I created, dragging and sizing them to how I needed them to be viewed. Using Wix felt smooth and efficient. While I had some issues with resizing my images exactly right, getting them to line up even when the auto align made it difficult, the finished product feels smooth and easy to look at and read. This will not have been my first time using Wix which is why I ended up using it rather than attempting HTML or WordPress as I was already teaching myself the Photoshop timeline function. For the gifs, I used Photoshop’s “Export>Save for web>GIF” function in order to save my files as gifs rather than JPEGS and be able to upload them effectively to my site.

This project helped me to learn some new things about Photoshop including manipulation of textured brushes, video timeline animation, and being able to upload these things to a Wix site. It pulled me from my comfort zone and allowed me to experiment with things that I don’t usually do even without having to learn HTML.