Module 2, last entry

This assignment was to create a comic , presenting water, a fence, a family, a wall and a dog, in that order. I had a rough time coming up with an inventive idea, and I'm not as proud of how the scans turned out for this assignment, but here it goes. The idea behind the strip is that it's a man escaping from prison. The first panel is supposed to be a man's foot after he steps in a puddle. Don't worry if you don;t see it like that, the scanner wasn't able to get the whole image perfectly. The second image has the same man escaping over a hole in the barbed wire of the prison fence. The 3rd panel goes double or nothing, with our man on the run climbing over a wall, towards a yard. I didn't really like this panel, because I didn't get the details too well drawn in. If you read this blog, you also already know how I feel about drawing faces though. In the last panel, before the man can get to the family, a dog chases him away, completing our comic to-do list for the day.

Module 2 part 3

Module 2's assignment was hard just because I had to come up with a good story. This was kind of pieced together, thinking back. I did try to stay with the fable/proverb feel of the painting itself, and make something kind of original, though I don;t really expect any awards for it.

Grid assignment

This is my poetry in comics assignment. The idea was to make a 2 panel grid, and have sequential "I used to _______", then "but now I ________". I decided to take one image, and split it into panels. I couldn't find a good way to flip my pic, as I had originally planned. It was supposed to symbolize the dark turning to the light, instead of the other way around. Well, aside from that, I tried to have a mix of serious and silly transitions, mostly just putting in whatever cam into my head at the time. enjoy.

Dr. Who, and the Waters of Mars

For the making a trailer assignment, I chose to pick a trailer for an upcoming special for Dr. Who, the longest running science fiction show in the world. I've been a fan for a while now, and I've been kind of looking forward to this coming out soon. The trailer itself seems to be aimed at both viewers new to the series, with a bunch of action scenes, and for fans, hinting, or directly referencing pieces of lot that have been in the show, like the "knock four times" comment. I figured this trailer would give me plenty of material for my comic style trailer.

Knowing that the people who have seen this show is in the minority compared to those who haven't, I didn't try to catch the trailer too much with my image trailer. I instead took several screen caps, mixed up the order, and made sense of it with captions. The movie *my* trailer descries would take place on a space ship, leaving mars for earth, and being attacked by a monster made of water they picked up at takeoff, who had taken humanoid form with a space suit. Going, back, that's something Dr. Who might try to do anyway. Something I find amusing is that the easiest person to make look like a monster and antagonist, is in fact the main character of the series, the good doctor himself in a space suit.

Here is a link to the actual trailer for comparison, enjoy:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ClNAiVhcIMA





Here is also a version with my ideas for captions and sounds:

comic captions assignment

The idea for this assignment was to take the image above, and add captions that would turn it into a story. I chose to make the story more akin to a setup for further story than a complete narrative. I basically used the first page to set up a state of normalcy, to match the images there. The second page is more of set up for action to take place on another page. I left it open ended, for now, but even added page numbers to make it seem as if there is more to come. My perfered ending is that the man swims across the lake to help the boy and save him from the dog, what's yours?

Calvin and Hobes

This assignment was about finding a Calvin and Hobbes comic with no words that I liked, posting it, and explaining why I like it. So the first thing I;m going to do is post some excellent fan art instead of the actual comic... To be fair, this picture sums up quite allot of the comic in one image. To do represent all that the comic series is and all the ideas it gets to would probably be impossible in one image though.















I LOVE Calvin and Hobbes, and have read most of their strips after discovering them in middle school. I still love the tone and presentation of the comics to this day. I chose this picture because it shows allot of what was going through Calvin's head when he was off in his own world of fun. I may have spent more time there than he did when I was in that age range. I also was a dinosaur freak too. Digging up some of the old comics not only reminds me of the time I spent reading them long ago, but the period when I had more time to just sit and stare into space, thinking about this and that, or having imaginary adventures with all my toys. Though I never had a stuffed tiger like Hobbes. In retrospect, that would have been awesome too.

Module 1 part 2: How to Make a d&d character

I decided to do my "How To" page on something almost all pencil and paper tabletop games have done dozens of times. Unfortunately, for those who aren't combat vets of dungeon sieges, this is slightly less intuitive. This hypothesis was only confirmed when I showed gamers the drawing, and they instantly understood it, and everyone else was trying to figure out what was going on. I used comic boxes and scale to try to impress what my personal ideas about gaming entail.

The first box, top left, has 3 people thinking about what to do with their epic heroes. The stick figures are generic representations of stereotypical adventurers. One has a sword, one has magic, and the other a bow. The stage looking multi sectioned thing is a "dungeon master screen," A staple of many games. I didn't give the players faces for 2 reasons. The first, and more symbolic reason is that of deciding on one's identity for the game. The second is that I can't really draw faces well. This will probably occur in many future works I submit, so get used to it.

The next panel is the step that everyone love or hates, depending on the person, and the game- doing the math. I tried to make it look as if the person was rolling the dice you see on the table, and I kind of succeed. This step is crucial for most games, if time consuming, but one or two hours of creating a character can translate into weeks and months of actual play time. The "final panel" is that of a player submitting his character to a GM, or game master, for final approval. You may noticed the cross fingers of said player, hoping to be approved, and to get onto the game.

The rest of the page is done in landscape. The assignment specified comic format, but I decided to take advantage of that in a different way. The panels at the top are the real world, in which all the set up happens, and in which the players are bound to that reality. The landscape, and battle scene have no borders, in my attempt to represent the unbounded possibilities of the world the game has created. This is technically against the assignment, but I figured I'd go for it and see what happens. I also attempted to put in a background that would imply a large world, full over verity, and wonder, not just the foreground of the completed characters, fighting goblins on the road. The end message I attempted to give off is related to the power and fun of imagination and gaming, when you can step into that new reality.