Category: Student Posts

Tell A True Story

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At my family’s shabbat dinner, my sister in law announced that she’s pregnant! Choosing to write about this story was pretty easy, because it’s a pivotal event in my families life.  I found this story challenging to draw and turn into a comic, because I had to adjust the story slightly in order to make the story clear and cohesive.  For example, she was actually the last to tell her “high and low,” but I wasn’t going to share everyones highs and lows before getting to the key part of the story. An important choice I made in creating the comic was making the bottom two frames bigger than the rest because those are the more dramatic and significant parts of the narrative.

Colin Combs Sketch

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I was drawn to this image, because I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that cameras can’t always capture what we see.  As much as I wish I could capture a moment and save it to my camera roll, I like the fact that some things can only be seen with my own two eyes. I recently went to a concert and whipped out my phone to take a video of the song and the performance.  I later looked at the video and noticed a sea of phones doing the exact same thing.  So much of this new age, iPhone centered, culture is about taking videos and pictures to keep or share.  But I’m starting to realize that these moments are being lived and seen through my phone and not by me.  As I spent time sketching this photo, I noticed that the girl is taking the picture of the fireworks, but the visual doesn’t pan out or replicate what she’s probably seeing.  I also noticed that the picture itself couldn’t capture the entirety of what was going on (the specks of light in the middle and the fireworks on the bottom).  However, what makes this photo “art” is the idea that you can interpret the image as you please.  Things and moments don’t have to be as they appear, otherwise there’s no room for imagination.

Sunday Sketch: Tell a True Story

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I really struggled coming up with a theme for this Sunday Sketch. I was wracking my brain for good conversations I had during Spring Break or since then. I was at a loss, until I remembered a conversation I had overheard during my break at home. Let me preface this comic a little bit. My cousin Lauren is 7 years old and LOVES boys. She met my boyfriend, Nathan, over Christmas and was a smitten kitten 5 minutes after they were introduced. We told Lauren that Nathan was coming to this game, and that is all she spoke about for about a week before. This is a conversation they had during the hockey game that my family, Nathan, and I attended over break. {P.S. she offered to lend him her bed so that he could spend the night, I’m not sure that he would have enjoyed a pink princess bed that much :)} This true story was easy to tell because it was an authentic conversation that I witnessed. I’m not sure if writing about a secondhand conversation would have been as easy as this one.

A True Story….

Most people have gone through this: imagine being with a group of friends, with a significant other, or even just alone, trying to decide where to eat. It’s a nightmare. You try to please everyone but each person tends to have their own preferences. It can take hours to decide where to eat. Now, imagine all the places you usually go are closed. That’s what happened to me when I was trying to decide where to eat with my boyfriend when I got back to campus early after spring break. All of the dining locations on campus were closed except for Kaldi’s, the over-priced yet very convenient coffee shop on Eagle Row. We tried to come up with many ideas off campus but could not agree. It seemed as an eternity passed, hence my little SpongeBob reference to “one eternity later.” Our laziness kicked in and we finally decided on Kaldi’s, due to it being so close to home. I feel that this comic can be very relatable as many people have gone through the same process of deciding on where to eat. This moment was a good one to pick for this assignment. Although it seemed like an eternity, it was only about 15 minutes in time and focused only on the subject at hand. It is a truthful yet relatable story, sort of in between the works of Spiegelman and Sacco.

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Literacy Narrative Feedback Reflection

In drawing out my literacy narrative comic draft, I tried to focus more on the text rather than the pictures. I tried to get the story down before I started creating very detailed drawings. My peers seemed to appreciate that by telling me “it was well written” and “light-hearted” much like I felt the original narrative was. However, I will definitely take their suggestions in my editing process. I will add some more detail and formulate a good conclusion for the end. I also want to put some variation in with panel shape and focus angles on my characters. In all, I felt like this peer editing process was really helpful in seeing what I should and should not change about my comic based on what I saw in the other ones that I read.

Reflection on Tracing Maus

Getting the initial ideas for this project weren’t the main difficulties. For me at least, the ideas came freely. The two main difficulties seemed to be in the fact that the project is so spread out and untangling threads connecting the three ideas to make them distinct. I felt like I had a lot of things to say about these pages, but it was hard to draw a line between some of them due to the interrelatedness of the ideas.

The act of tracing the pages made me respect Spiegelman for the sheer amount of time alone taken to draw the pages, not including the planning of the individual pages or even considering the role of those individual pages in the larger storyline.

Overall, I think this gave me a better appreciation as to the thought that goes into posts that are online. I think I have also become more attuned to the ways webpages are set up to make them more easily navigable. I guess I had never really noticed when there was good design to a website, but I distinctly felt it when a webpage had poor navigation.

Link to Tracing Maus

A True Story…

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I struggled to find a story that I wanted to tell. I thought about it over spring break and still couldn’t find anything. Then, when I was looking for it, the story just came to me. The moment was so strange and unexpected I knew this was the perfect story. I may or may not have modified what actually happened for a comedic effect, but the gist of what happened is still there. I’m definitely more on the spectrum of what I feel Sacco does where he may or may not make himself look better with the stories he tells and change them a little, where as Spiegelman takes the story as it is and simply adds artistic flare through the images. I wanted the overall layout of the page to convey something through just a simple glance and so what I did was use very dark colors to make it seem like the dark and stormy night it was on the night that the event happened. I also knew that I had to be as accurate as I could with the Emory shuttle because it is such an important part to the story, featured in two panels. I also wanted the second panel and the last panel to be the same to show like there was an arc to the story by showing that something changed.

And yes it may sound odd, but the bus driver confused me speaking Spanish with cursing.

Tell a True Story

When we were told to think closely about an adventure, conversation, or experience from break for this sketch assignment, what I would do came to me immediately.  In addition to a home cooked meal, clean bed, and time with my family, my favorite thing about going home is seeing my best friends and going to our favorite place in town.  My town is on the water which has its many perk including the most amazing views at anytime of day- especially sunset. When my friends and I got our drivers licenses, our favorite activity became taking drives around town and singing along to our favorite songs.  We would drive the same streets over and over again taking in the moment as much as possible, especially when leaving for college got closer. Our favorite road is this one way street that we either stop the car at or loop around countless times. Here, you can look out across the water into New York City.  During the day you see the skyline and at night you see the lights that depict the magnitude of the big apple city. We call it “The View.”

I loved the Novel The Things They Carried.  After completing it, I was blown away how Tim O’brien’s war experience does not actually align with the “true war story” told.  Some characters do not actually exist within his life and scenes did not play out as written in the novel. But, the “true war story” is the generalization of the soldiers during this war experience.  So, telling my true story in this comic is not the exact scene that may or may not have taken place with my friends at home during spring break; it is the adventure that I have gone on countless times all leading up to the same view.  The view that depicts home for me.

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Collin Combs in Class Sketch

With the warm weather just around the corner, I decided to pick the photo with the teenager jumping into the pool.  Warm weather brings outdoor activities and summer brings free time for adventure.  This teenager’s spontaneity looks exhilarating.  For some reason the spikes that his wet hair makes with the gravity of his flip depicts this for me; I worked to exaggerate that in my sketch.  This photograph is also very simple with large shapes taking up the majority of the space instead of smaller details. As I spent time looking closer at the photograph, this became more apparent.  For the cheap camera and unprofessional circumstance this photograph was taken under, there is not even that much of a blur. Today people spend so much time aligning the click of a camera with a jump.  It is down to the second to actually get the model in the photo to be in the air. Even with the unprofessional situation and complex jump, it worked out perfectly. I love that this photo was definitely meant to exist.

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Summarizing My Draft

After reading the comment sheets given back to me in class, I noticed a few things that I am really considering taking into consideration when re-configuring my comic.

-all 3 of my results told me to fill in the last two panels (I am still struggling to figure out what to illustrate there, if you have ANY ideas please let me know)

-a few comments were about my frames, mostly to change the size as to not have a grid for a page, however, all critics enjoyed the differences in frame and angle that were utilized

-2/3 people noted on my use of difference in focus, they both noted how they liked the focus shifting from people to objects and back to people, some fries are completely dedicated to a simple objects or a group of similar objects (i.e. a stack of books)

-all noted that my comic was relatively lighthearted and hopeful, this is the kind of emotion I was hoping to pull out of my readers, my journey was never really difficult so I wanted to show that I had a really positive experience with reading and writing when I was younger

Collectively, the critiques given by my peers were very helpful. I enjoyed seeing the feedback, both positive constructively critical. I think the comments will help me build better comic than I could have all by myself.

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