Kristin Becker's DTC Classes at WSU

My final weekly comic about putting it all together incompasses what art means to me. The comic briefly describes how I define art as a universal expression of who you are and how you feel. I don’t think art can be confined to any one medium and can even be through cooking or singing. While I am growing progressively more tired of this quarantine and stay at home order I am trying to think of all of the positives that may sprout from this odd historical event. My favorite thing that I have come up with is the rebirth of art and hobbies. It seems that people stopped doing arts and crafts at home, they didn’t feel good at it, or have enough time to commit to creativity. But now that people are trapped in their homes, art is coming back. More people are blogging, sewing, painting, drawing, and dancing because it’s fun and they enjoy it, self expression is coming back through common arts. While it’s possible that after that world starts spinning again people will put their embroidery hoops down there will still be an art boom that will come from this stay at home time. 

My idea for the comic was to create a visual of all the things that people are doing with their time at home. Its form is the comic that has been created in illustrator using a specific time frame and gutters. Its idiom is that it’s a narrative comic the character is not the speaker but rather the narrator. I chose the structure of this comic in a very specific way. I had previously been working in 6 panels in a very linear and non creative layout. In attempt to raise the bar in my work I changed the size of the boxes that carry less weight and made 1 large box contain four time frames rather than using the space of 4 boxes. I put a large amount of focus in color line and balance in this comic. I made the first panel attempt to have a psychedelic feel by having colorful rings emanate out from art objects. I created this texture by taking the circle tool and then the curvature tool to create the shapes and make them unique. In the next panel I mostly just used the shape creator tool and the curvature tool to make the shapes and for the blanket I used the gradient tool. I chose these colors and gradients because they match the colors and flow in the first panel. For the third panel I wanted to use some more visual language and by creating a ghost and saying ghost town it creates an element of word dependence. For the longest panel I used time frames by having one person do their different activities of the day in the same panel. I used the text broken up above their heads to show a variance in time. I chose the colors and the font of my comic by their natural and happy feel. I have used this font in a previous comic and am choosing to reuse it for this one because It holds the right feel. I chose to capitalize all the words because it gives an omnipicent tone. Lastly the colors fit both the realistic and upbeat quality that I wanted this comic to have. 

This comic was much more ambitious than my last two comics. I typically use much less colors and lines. I used the paintbrush tool as a main tool in this comic to be able to give detail and thinner lines. My past comics took me around 3 hours a piece to complete but from sketching out to completion for this comic I took a day and a half. I am much more proud of this piece that I have been of past ones because there is more depth, meaning, and detail in this comic. 

After reading chapter seven from Scott McCloud, I began to brainstorm what I wanted to portray in the comic for the week. The idea that I had when creating the comic was to express what happens in my mind when I listen to music. I wanted to link music to imagination, showing what I see in my own eyes when I listen to it. There is not a second in the day that I am not listing to music and I showcase that in the comic. I want the viewer to be able to enter my imagination throughout the strip and connect to the power that music has. Music can be used as a way of isolation, in doing so it keeps the listener calm.

To create the comic, I used Adobe Illustrator. The first thing I did was use the rectangle tool to create the boarders that I wanted to shape out the panels. I then created another layer and used the unique style to create the comic. I started the first panel off with a close shot of a person listening to music. I chose the color black because I wanted it to symbolize reality and purple symbolizes imagination. I used a different type of style for the purple and wrapped it around the headphones to make it look like aura. The next panel is the same person walking on a cross walk except the entire background is created in their imagination. Everything is imaginary except for the person that is listening to music.

In the following panel, there is another close on the eye of the person that is listening to music. I changed the color of the eye to the same color of their imagination. The reasoning behind this is to find to the reader that everything that is purple in the scene is what the person that is listening to music is envisioning. Then in the final panel of the comic, the reader is finally introduced to reality and views what is going on around the person that is listening to music. The cross walk is crowded with people that are coming and going. Meanwhile the person that is listening to music is lost in their own imagination. The music is isolating them from rest of the crowed, placing them their own imagination. Even though they are still physical present in the crowd of people.

For the previews comics that I have created for the class, I felt that they only have one meaning and one way of looking at them. While in this comic I wanted to challenge that and leave the meaning behind the comic up to interpretation of the reader. I did not want to take a stand on if listening to music in public could be a bad thing or a good thing, so instead I just showed the power that music can have on people. It can be used as a way of isolation while also keeping you calm and motivated.