I had SO much fun at the workshops. I think I’ll talk about them one by one, and then go over my thoughts in between. Overall, I thought the activities were well thought out and super interesting. I think Norrie’s workshops were my favorites. Mainly the ones with working on a cover. I only had time to work on it for an hour, and Taran was pulled aside to work on another group’s project since their artist was not there.
Ok. Workshop 1 I guess. So that was the one where we worked on a cover for our piece. Norrie ran this one. We all came up with a two sentence blurb about our comic, and we were expected to use the information in a piece for the comic’s cover. For me, I was a little confused how to get everything used in our blurb into the cover, so I just decided to go for a simple character image of the three main leads. It didn’t turn out as well as I’d hoped, but I had some help with Norrie and it turned out decent I think. I finished it on the second or third day, I cannot remember.
Onto Workshop 2. I think this one was more of a performative piece? We all got together, and basically traced ourselves onto a huge sheet of paper, one themed about Future, and one themed about the past. I was the only artist on the future side, so I was a little confused at how to handle all the writers, who were approaching the piece a little more analytically than I would have liked. It ended up working out, though, but we were a lil’ jealous of the other teams. I mean, who wouldn’t be? Alpha was on that team. I swear he turns all art he touches to gold.
The third workshop had us rushing around like chickens with our heads cut off. we had to work on the actual presentations for our team’s projects. This was really hard for me because I did leave my laptop at home. I couldn’t take it along as it wouldn’t fit in my bag. My backpack would have had to have been checked. I’m glad I could at least take my iPad. I relied mostly on my teammates for help with this step, and we all figured out how we were going to handle the presentation as a group.
I finished up a quick cover during this working session, and I passed it off to Kaela and Theo to put into the powerpoint. It ended up going really rather well with it, and I really felt that our presentation was strong. It was a good day overall, despite Kaela and I sleeping in because I forgot to set my alarms. The good thing was we weren’t too late. I’m just glad we didn’t sleep through the whole thing, because we were rather tired.
So for the things I did not know, I didn’t know really what we were doing at all, or when these things would be implemented. For the choices I made, I did make a decision to stay a little longer and draw out the cover to the comic. As for how it affected my career choices? I feel like because I had taken some time to make something a bit more polished, I may have gotten a bit more positive feedback and people asking to network with me at the after-party thingy. Alpha and I got pulled aside by some of the grad students and we got some tips and also interesting tidbits from them.
I overall learned a ton from this trip about my own art and how I shape up against others. Now I know that I always need to strive to do better even if it’s just the next page of my webcomic.
Works Cited:
Cromar, William. “narrativeArtsDundeeWorkshops”. newMedia Wiki. 2022. http://newmediawiki.pbworks.com/w/page/149510580/narrativeArtsDundeeWorkshops Accessed December 1st, 2022.