Senior Project – Creating a Comic

Claim: The goal of this Senior Project is to discover and explore the world of comic book art and writing. By combining storytelling and art, the final product will be a graphic novel that will entertain and educate the reader, depicting a variety of subjects such as racism, depression, mockery, heroism, and development of character.

Reason: For the writer, there must be lots of development of the story and several revisions before arriving to the final product. A writer must address many requirements to make a comic successful, such as audience, plot, engagement with the audience, and most importantly, themes.

Comic book art is quite challenging. Not only does an artist produce sequential art, but also each scene must capture the reader’s eye. This helps to develop the artist’s perspective of art as well as draw much more than one object at a time in order to have a coherent picture. The artists will also have to expand his skill set in computer drawing programs like Photoshop and GIMP.

(James' first foray into Photoshop coloring could use improvement)

Evidence: At the end of this project, the evidence shall be:

• Concept Art
• Sketches
• Script
• Writing
• Outlining
• Un-inked sequential art

Value: Although creating a comic book may seem simple and uninteresting, there is a lot of value in completing this project. The artist and writer must become very creative and spend lots of time to develop their work in order to capture their audience’s eye – high school students and older. They must incorporate pop-culture and clever writing to engage the reader as well keep the creators motivated. As a result, comic books can be produced to portray a myriad of subjects in order to educate, and entertain people of all ages, such as world history and politics and ultimately become a tool for education. The skills learned in this project can help expand our abilities in creative expression and build on the future of sequential storytelling.