Final Critique for Art 349 Comics et Picture Books!

Students get freak-ay at last year's Comics n' Picture Books final crit.

Final critique for Comics unt Picture Books is Wednesday, June 2 at 3:00 in MA 101. Bring 5 copies of your work, and we'll have a reading festival. Miles shall bring some snaks.

Art 349 Comics Assignments & Schedule

Let 'em rip. For Wednesday, October 6, do one of the following:

1. A 4 panel strip.
2. A 1 page comic.
3. A free-form narrative drawing (a la Maurice Sendak). This can be multi-page if you want.

For class, we'll discuss developing an approach to the visual side of things (I think the technical term for this is "art"). We'll check out Scott McCloud's pyramid, page templates, and thumbnails.

For Monday, October 11, we'll talk about lettering, typography, page layout, speech bubbles and the like.

For Wednesday, October 13 you'll present your project proposals to the class. Use the guidelines for the Art 450/496 projects. Make sure your proposal is entirely on your blog as that's what I'll be evaluating. Bonus: it'll be much harder for you to lose or forget to bring with you once it's on line. The only thing that could stop us would be some kind of computer/network outage, but that will never happen.

Art 349 Comics Assignment

Here's your weekend assignment. Enjoy!
1) Create the folder where you'll be keeping a hold of all your stuff (sketches, notes, source material, research, breakdowns, writing, etc) related to your project. Make it portable so you can bring it to class.

2) Take a first stab at a treatment for your project. What's a treatment? I use the term to refer to any kind of rough first stab at developing your project. A treatment can include some early attempts at the basic components of a book project: writing, illustration, layout and design. It could include a plot sketch or outline. You could write a description of the setting or world your book takes place in. What kind of characters live there? It can also be more abstract--something relating to the feeling or vibe you're trying to achieve, but not yet settled into any kind of final form. One of my favorite treatment examples (possibly apocryphal) is David Lynch being obsessed with a piece of blue velvet (the material) for a long time before making the film Blue Velvet.

3) On your blog, visually analyze a page of a book that you like. Look at type choice and size, use of white space, relation of pictures to images and the like. If you're doing a comic, note the lettering and gutter choices, panel breakdown, etc. Approach this not as a critic, but on a functional "how does this tick?" level.

4) Blog a bit about your creative process. How are you going to get this project done? Some things you might think about: Where do you like to work? Do you have a ritual? A schedule? What distracts you? How can you deal with those distractions?

Git yer blogs going and bring all of this good stuff into class on Monday for show and tell. Looking forward to seeing what's cookin'!