Sip of Starlight
On Saturday night, walking back to my dorm, I paused out front to watch the stars. That quiet moment made me think about astronomy and the calm pleasure of simply observing—so I outlined the figure in blue, a color that feels relaxing to me. Back in my room, a Coca-Cola bottle caught my eye; its long silhouette looked like a telescope, and the base resembled a magnifying glass. I’ve always loved astronomy documentaries, so it felt natural to turn that spark into a Sunday Sketch about the night sky. I titled it Sip of Starlight because the bottle becomes part of the scene, and I marked the sky with yellow-highlighter stars so they appear to glow and shine at night.
My reflection on this narrative writing process is that I felt strange doing freewriting by noticing things happening around me, because when I write, I’m not used to being aware of my surroundings. Doing that really allowed me to relax and focus more on how I feel and what I sense in the moment. I think it also helped me better recall my writing and reading experiences. I found that there is a connection between my ability to write now and my childhood experiences with reading and writing. I think many of my struggles with writing and reading came from my early childhood, and they were areas in which I lacked when I was younger. I think this sentence, “These moments taught me that growth in reading and writing is not a straight line. It curves, pauses, and sometimes restarts, but it moves forward when I keep practicing.” is the most interesting because it speaks to a lot of people, and many can resonate with the experience that sometimes things can be hard and you just have to be patient and learn to overcome the difficulties. I think this is true not only in writing but in anything else in life, too. As long as you are trying your best, you can achieve the things you want to do.
When I first began writing The Overcast Summer, I brainstormed my most prominent reading moments. To be honest, there weren’t many. However, I realized that the overall change in how I view reading was something I could passionately write about. I remembered when summer reading was first introduced and how distraught I felt once I learned I had to do work over the summer. While writing this piece, I discovered that the change eventually made me enjoy reading. I also realized the impact Percy Jackson had on my reading journey while I was brainstorming for the page. I believe the most interesting sentence would be when i described first opening Percy Jackson and how my surroundings impacted me because of the description I used.
I was honestly shuffling through a few different ideas when I first started thinking about this sketch assignment. While passing my soccer ball around my room off the ottoman, I suddenly got the idea to do something soccer-related. That’s when I started looking around for an everyday object I could incorporate into the sketch as a soccer ball.
As I was about to throw away an empty water bottle, I noticed the cap and realized it could work perfectly as the ball. That small discovery sparked the rest of the concept.
Once I had the idea in place, I put pencil to paper and began sketching a person mid-air performing an acrobatic scissor kick I titled the piece “Cap-tivating Kick which ties in both the action and the real object I used.
Overall, I really enjoyed this assignment. It challenged me to be creative in a new way by combining a real object with a drawn scene. It was a fun and imaginative process that made the sketch come to life.
When I first started this Sunday sketch assignment, I had no clue what to do. I doodled with my pen for almost ten minutes until I noticed its sharpened tip and thought of a blade. That sparked the idea to use the pen as a symbol for a knife—a tool that can create or cut, depending on the hand that holds it. The next question was, who should hold this “knife”? After a thoughts, I settled on a samurai. To me, the samurai is iconic not only in Japanese culture but also as an image of discipline, honor, and mastery of the sword.
Seeing the description of this assignment I knew I would run into some issues. Due to my lack of creativity and artistic skills, it took me a while to come up with my idea. I started by looking around my room to see if anything stood out to me but nothing did. Deciding to put if off for a little while, I went to the gym with my friends. While at the gym, this assignment was still in the back of my head. I looked at my surroundings when finally something stuck out to me. It was a man lifting weights on the other side of the gym. Seeing that the bar he was using to lift weights looked similar to a straight stick I knew what my drawing was going to be. I went back to my dorm where I sketched out this drawing that depicted the man I saw but replaced the weight bar with something that looked very similar to it. I chose to replace it with a q-tip I found next to my night stand because they both have similar features.
Fore my Sunday sketch (get it) I decided to create a golf scene using a leaf. I originally intended to use the leaf as either a moon or a cricket bat but I decided that a comically large golf club was funnier and so my sketch was born. I had no Idea of what I wanted to do before I started the sketch so it was all pretty spontaneous. The drawing itself took me longer than it may seem as I am not the most talented of artists. I have no real interest in golf so I am not too certain why the idea came to me but I thought it was funny. I like to make people laugh so I hope it has similar effects to you (my wonderful viewer) as it did to me.
Here is a link to the original assignment given by professor David Morgan
While I was hanging up my towel after showering, my hook fell off the wall. Initially, I was frustrated and attempted to tape it back up, but I realized that it had a similar shape to a surfboard. I noticed that the adhesive was similar to wax on an actual surfboard and the hook was similar to a fin. I decided to draw a surfer on top of the hanger riding a large wave. I wanted to draw something connected to the ocean because I was always at the beach in California.
https://engrd101f25.davidmorgen.org/sketches/sketch-2-sunday-sketches/
For Tuesday, you should have published your Literacy Narrative essay as a page on your site. You should also have published your reflection post and sketch 2.
In class on Tuesday, we’ll spend a lot of class time on Randy Olson’s ABT thesis structure. You should be able to skim the Olson essay fairly quickly — the key idea is understanding the (bad) deductive structure that Olson describes and then his suggestion for improving it by utilizing a (good) inductive structure instead. I’ll post a student essay that I received in the past and we’ll spend a chunk of time in class with a hands-on activity restructuring that student’s argument into the ABT structure.
We’ll also look at two chapters from Unflattening by Nick Sousanis, who drew the book as his dissertation for Teachers College at Columbia University — it was the first comics dissertation ever and has since been published by Harvard UP and has won a bunch of awards. Sousanis took a job at San Francisco State University a couple of years ago and is building a comics studies program there.
Unflattening will serve as one of the theoretical frameworks for our analyses of comics. Be aware that this comic is quite a bit more dense reading than Brosh’s web comic or than you’ll find Stitches to be, so give yourself a little extra time to work through those 20 pages carefully. I’ll start off our discussion of Sousanis by asking you to consider how effective Unflattening is as an academic, philosophical argument. (Soon we’ll read another theoretical framing text, but in the form of a more traditional essay by Hillary Chute and I’ll ask you to consider how the two pieces are similar and different.) How do the words and images in Unflattening interact together?
We’ll spend most of our time in class on Thursday discussing the reading from Stitches, starting with the following questions:
Pick the single page that you find the most compelling or interesting or that you think is the most important in today’s reading. Describe the page in a few sentences. Why is it interesting or important?
How does Small establish character and setting in the introduction?
This chapter all takes place while David is 6 years old. What are the major subdivisions of the chapter though? You’ll probably decide that there are three (maybe four) major sections in these pages — what is the primary idea being conveyed by each section?
My avatar is a collage that brings together the people and things that define me.. I have included pictures of some of the people I am really close to, including my family and friends. these are my comfort people. I have also included two symbols of a personal journey; Diet Coke and a gym picture. I grew up obese but started working out last year and have since lost around 20 pounds. this could not be possible without the gym , and surprisingly , diet sodas.
all images in this picture are my own .I have used pixlr to edit the avatar
