Month: March 2022

This is the final version of the first chapter! Instead of splitting it into two chapters, I decided to make a long first chapter. This would make it easier to present in the gallery for my Senior Project and avoid any error or potential misclicks into completely unrelated content or ads. I made my first strawpoll as well (here) which can be up for as long as I need it to be, and view votes without needing to vote myself. I will create the twitter poll the week of the gallery opening as twitter polls can only last a week. This is an experiment to see also what polling platform the audience prefers! If it seems like a strong lean for strawpoll or twitter, I’ll then know what platform I should use exclusively for future polls. Once I get the results from this chapter, I’ll then upload the next one following the route the audience voted on.

 

 

This week I looked back at the artist that originally inspired me in high school to strive for making my own webcomic. I presented Michelle Czajkowski, the author of Ava’s Demon, in my Contemporary Art Seminar as a “living mentor” and shared how I thought their art influenced my style and hopes as an artist.

https://avasdemon.com

Now looking at the art of Ava’s Demon, I thought about what I liked about it and how I  could help my own comic by taking inspiration from it. I struggle the most with text bubbles, so I really studied Michelle’s bubbles to improve my own. To start, I decided to spend time and use Caligraphr and create my own font using my own hand writing.

 

I went in and adjusted pages I thought looked weaker. Adding the new font in where it was needed. As well as went through and adjusted the text bubbles, creating color coded bubbles for each character. I think this really steps up the level of creativity and makes the text feel like a piece of the art rather than stickers on top of it.

 

 

After sharing my initial pages with Cromar, he addressed something I never really thought about before. How word bubbles should appear while on a comic page because, they are visual also! They need to be thought about as carefully as the panels and layouts are! After looking at a link Cromar gave me of Winsor McCay, I compared it to what I liked about Oratoreye’s Mritunjoy’s Tragicomedy .

I realized what I liked about these speech bubbles, and how effortless the words are integrated into the work, and do not obstruct the art either. Becoming a part of the piece as a whole. This is something I want to explore more with my work now.

I am still messing with how I want to lay out text, but I am happy with this almsot completed chapter so far!

I also joined some larger art communities on discord, one of which is ran by the artist mentioned previously, Oratoreye! I promoted myself and some characters designs I did for my comic. Sharing my art with fellow artists. As well started making friendly connections in this group.