The process of project III
was a whole new experience. I’ve never made a long comic like this before, and it was interesting to learn about the process as I went, the process of taking a story and turning it into a visual one. Not only did I have to consider how to split up the story into different pages, and different visual representations, but I also had to write new text to correspond with these images. Choosing to do a visual narrative of my project II was a fairly easy choice; it felt like a very natural combination of my art and writing, and a very natural progression based on the artwork I’ve done in the past. It was the making of it that was more challenging.
I had the full story written out in my project II; it was just a matter of reorganizing the same story in a way that would best fit the visual format. I also knew that the whole story—from the beginning, when I failed my review, until the end (which is, kind of, now)– couldn’t be completed in a month. So, I decided to only make the introduction for the full narrative. While project II tells the story from the beginning, moving chronologically from when I failed my review until when my parents found my work, I felt like I had to reformat the story to draw the reader in, and present the problem from the beginning. You can read more about that in my project proposal. In order to do that, I decided that the introduction would narrate an event at the end of the story, when my parents found my website. This presents the conflict right away, while also introducing the themes that the rest of the book will be about. It also causes the reader to wonder how I got in that situation in the first place—why I was hiding my work, my relationship with my family, why I made my work at all. All of those details would be elaborated on in the following chapters, the first one going back to May, when I failed my review. Throughout these chapters, the other research I completed in project II about Alison Bechdel, David Sedaris, and Tracey Emin would be woven throughout, each of those artists/writers appearing throughout the chapters and giving advice.
Having planned out the introduction and the consecutive chapters, my next step was to begin outlining the story in the introduction. To get some ideas about varying page layouts and other ways to structure a graphic narrative, I looked to a few other graphic narratives, like David Small’s Stitches, Alison Bechdel’s Are You My Mother and Fun Home, Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl, and The Book of Genesis illustrated by R. Crumb. I noticed that varying perspective and scale, as well as the amount of text within (small descriptions, dialogue, or longer descriptions) were all important in the interesting layouts of the pages.
The next step was to actually start drawing. I decided that setting up setting and context for where I was, who I was, and where my family was an important part of the story, so I began with that, showing my at my house in Michigan, talking to my girlfriend, and my parents at home in Minnesota. I wanted to show this parallel of what I was doing while my parents found my work—I was talking to my girlfriend, who they didn’t even know about, or even that I was gay—while they discovered all this information about me within my work. From there, I needed to show the panic that resulted from my dad calling and texting me, and so I chose to illustrate just my portrait, reacting to kind-of already knowing what my parents were calling about.
In order to give a bit more context about my own life, and what my parents finding my work meant, I decided to draw a page that was a type of flashback to all of the parts of my life I was keeping from them, and also how my dad reacted to that—pretty nonchalantly. My sexuality wasn’t an issue for my dad, but the prints were. I emphasized that by then moving into the long phone conversation I had with him, and how it ended pretty non-conclusively—I did this in a panel by panel grid, showing not only how the conversation went, but also our body language and facial expressions.
In order to show how inconclusive our conversation was, and how empty it made me feel, I needed an image to show the isolation of that conversation. So, I chose to draw me in my room where I had been talking on the phone, standing there, alone, with the text “I felt defeated” within the image. I knew that I also needed to give some more textual content to why these prints were so significant to me, and why my parents not understanding them was also very significant—so, the next page, I wrote out a longer description, combining that with an image of a family photo, and also including the books of the authors/artists I plan on incorporating later. This was the height of conflict within the introduction, so in order to signal a closing in the narrative, I included some of my thoughts that I had that night, feeling like I could never make a work of art or write anything again, and paired that with me going to sleep; turning the lights off and lying in bed looking at my phone. To bring the narrative full circle, I chose to end with an illustration of my house that I introduce in the first and second page of the story, asking “is it worth it?” for the second time. Here, you can see the first sketches and writing.
The most challenging part of this project was revising it. After getting workshopped in class, I got a lot of great feedback. The only problem was, a lot of it also contradicted each other—some people really liked certain parts, while other people really didn’t like those same parts. After reading through the feedback, there were only a few main changes that I ended up making from my first to second draft. I added drawings and descriptions of my prints, to give a bit more information and context about them. I also consolidated the scene with my parents discovering the prints onto this same page as the prints. I also added the books of the writers and authors on one of the last pages, and consolidated the drawings of my going to bed onto one page, and making the last page just a drawing of my house. I also made some changes to the text, removing the information about me failing the review, just to avoid readers getting confused.
If I had more time, I would have included more hatching and shading in the drawings, to give them a bit more depth. However, due to time constraints I had to leave the drawings as simple line drawings. That’s something that I can do over the summer, or in the Capstone project, along with finishing the rest of the book. Overall, project III was really successful. I am really please with how the drawings turned out, and I think project II translated into project III in a way that gave it even more meaning than project II, because of the illustrations.
Phoebe Gloeckner's work
A page from Alison Bechdel's Are You My Mother?
A page from R. Crumb's Illustrated Book of Genesis
A page from David Small's Stitches,