When I made this comic, I just wanted it to be funny and kind of relatable. I thought it’d be fun to show someone trying to be healthy but instantly giving in to temptation, since that’s something most people have probably done. The hardest part was figuring out how to make the joke land in only three panels without dragging it out too much. I realized the middle panel had to clearly show the turning point, or the last one wouldn’t feel like a punchline.
When I made this comic, I just wanted it to be funny and kind of relatable. I thought it’d be fun to show someone trying to be healthy but instantly giving in to temptation, since that’s something most people have probably done. The hardest part was figuring out how to make the joke land in only three panels without dragging it out too much. I realized the middle panel had to clearly show the turning point, or the last one wouldn’t feel like a punchline.
I first thought of making my triptych a duel, but three panels didn’t feel sufficient for a smooth fight sequence. I’ve added a twist in the last panel—the duel is actually a scene from a TV show a man is watching on his couch.
I first thought of making my triptych a duel, but three panels didn’t feel sufficient for a smooth fight sequence. I’ve added a twist in the last panel—the duel is actually a scene from a TV show a man is watching on his couch.
When making my narrative, I first had to decide whether to find images or draw them. I’m not a big artist and drawing is very time consuming personally, so I wanted to find images online. However, for my vision that I had of a school prank, it was difficult to find images that met the copyright standards. Because of this, I decided to draw my narrative. I wanted to make each frame larger as the story went on, to portray the rising action. This comic strip is a bit different than the other projects because it tells a progressing story, but similar in the sense that we’re combining different images to create one project.
While making this comic I wanted to create a series of pictures that would display a common phrase and a common scenario in peoples lives. Spilling milk when I was young came to my mind and I decided to make a story about it. The first panel shows the milk sitting on the table. The next shows the milk spilled and thew child crying. In the third Fram the father comes in and says the famous saying, “Don’t cry over spilled milk.” A challenge about this assignment was finding a clever phrase that I could convert into images that was popular enough to be well known but after a bit of brainstorming I came to this conclusion. Finally, this comic is different from other assignments because of the limit of three frames to tell an entire story which was challenging but also enjoyable.
My triptych sketch is a play on karma as a bird pooped on the taller boy after he laughed at the little boy dropping his ice cream. An interesting aspect I came across while doing this assignment was combining multiple events in one panel. Planning how to fit the story in only three panels encouraged me to group occurrences together such as the bird pooping mid air for foreshadowing while showing why the taller boy was laughing with the ice cream dropping on the ground. This experience is very different from writing since I typically can write as much as I want and however detailed I want it but in this assignment I barely used any words and had to set the emotions through facial expressions.
My triptych this week was a 3-panel satirical dig at materialistic mindsets. In the first panel, both characters agree that money can’t buy happiness, and that it only comes from within. In the second panel, they go on a shopping spree with bags full of clothes, new phones, and a new car. Despite their temporary jubilation, the feelings of joy wear off shortly in the third panel. The man sarcastically says, “I think that I bought inner peace too…”.
In terms of idea generation, I was able to use the creativity involved with triptychs to create what was exactly on my mind at the time – a critique of materialistic mindsets. Due to my limited artistic abilities, I used a cartoonish style, mixing it in with satire/a sarcastic sense of humor – a decision which represents my style as a person. As expected, the most difficult part of the composition process was putting ideas onto paper, but with some persistence I was able to create what was a fairly accurate depiction of my thought process. The triptych in general was similar to the assignments we’ve done so far in the sense that we had to create some sort of narrative (although very short) and use our creative side to visually depict our narrative in some way.
For this assignment, I chose to compose a story from my daily life. It’s a story that happens a lot between my cat and me: I often buy her many toys, but she always turns out to like the cheapest and most ordinary things, which sometimes pisses me off. But I think this story is light and funny in its own way, since I believe many people with pets (especially cats) can relate to this and find this nature of their cats both frustrating and funny. This assignment took me longer than I expected. I initially thought it would be easy to come up with three drawing panels, but when I thought about the story I wanted to bring, it tricked me—because I not only needed to come up with an idea but also had to convey it in just three panels. Condensing the story was not easy for me. For other assignments, I mostly had some sort of text support (such as note-taking or the narrative 1: self-reflection) or just needed to be creative for a single artwork. But for this one, I had to combine my skill in storytelling through writing with art—presenting it in an art form. I think the transition into that kind of thinking was tricky for me, but I found it enjoyable since I had the chance to turn what would normally be a short piece of writing into a storytelling triptych.
