Category: Student Posts

I decided to take a lighthearted, comical approach when crafting my story. I partly took inspiration from the Nancy triptych mentioned in the prompt and another triptych I came across that showed the struggle of a chocolate chip cookie actually being an oatmeal raisin cookie. I brainstormed situations in which there would be a fun surprise in the third panel and settled on a relatable awkward but laughable situation of someone “accidentally” eating someone else’s food. It was easy for me to come up with the components of each panel however I struggled with making the ending easily understood but not too obvious. I decided to use a zoomed-in perspective so that the reader can see the thief’s reaction and the subtle clue on the food container. This sketch was similar to previous writing in that our literacy narrative comics needed to be condensed forms of a larger story. This sketch differed in that we had an even more limited space (only 3 frames) to express a whole story.

It was hard to make a single image containing three frames and one picture, since I wanted to use only one picture like the triptych that I saw on A softer world. I used two different apps, Pixlr and Notability, to create my frames and used Flickr to search for a picture that goes well with my text. I wanted to write and express something that I have experienced in my life. I tried to show how I felt when everything I did collapsed because of one mistake I made, even though I did so hard on everything else. I spent a quite long time writing those sentences and choosing an image that correlates to my feeling. Crafting this sort of comic strip was easier, but also harder compared to other writing I have done this semester. At first, I felt it easy to write three short sentences. However, the shorter the sentence, the more impactful it had to be, so it was not as easy as I thought, since I needed more creativity.

This week’s Sunday Sketch was inspired by last class’s discussion on gaslighting. I tried to emulate the same set up and delivery Emily and Joey do in In a Softer World. I spent about 30 minutes going through the archive because I really liked the way they made every strip. For my strip, I wanted to make it a conversation someone may overhear when walking past a couple arguing at a subway station. For the dialogue, I tried to make it ironic that the “manipulator” was gaslighting his girlfriend when being confronted about doing that exact thing. During the composition, I was making it on the GoodNotes app on my Ipad but then I decided to make it on Google Slides because it has indicators that made it easier to “even” out the placements of the lines I used to divide the image in three and place the dialogue text boxes in a uniform way. The most challenging part of this sketch was trying to write a dialogue for it that interesting. My process when making this comic was fundamentally different than when I made my other comics because I felt like I had a more creative inspiration from In a Softer World.

Link back to assignment: https://eng181s21.davidmorgen.org/assignments/sketches/sketch-5-triptych/