Emily Nally
May 18th, 2020
CR 6
What is the process of making comic strips like?
Since the Covid-19 adjustment was made to all of our original Senior Project plans, I definitely had to alter my expectations along with my project itself. Initially, I thought the idea of my house being a studio would not be much different from working in Lab A at school. I thought things like my motivations and my work ethic won’t be affected by the change in scenery, but I was very much wrong. It was incredibly easy for me to snooze my alarm and start working on Senior Project at a random time every day. It was really easy for me to work for 20 minutes and want a break and end up taking over an hour to do nothing productive. A part of me wanted to settle with the fact that I won’t produce art at home as good as my art from school, where I consistently have the eyes of classmates and teachers and where I have more access to supplies. But another part of me didn’t want to use that as an excuse to produce work I’m not satisfied with. Finding a balance to help me focus on my project was a hard adjustment I had to make.
I think I met my major goals in Senior Project. I tried to be careful and not give myself harsh deadlines because I learned that in this environment, I didn’t want to create rushed and “robotic” work to meet deadlines. I also didn’t say I wanted a [blank] number of comic strips at the end of 6 weeks because I’ve never worked with this process before, therefore I had no concept of how long a panel would take me. I think I met my goals in that I have successful comic strips that I really love and less successful ones that I took a lot out of and applied to my future pieces.
I think a risk I took in my Senior Project is my decision to not use words to tell my stories. I’ve talked about this a little in previous Critical Reflections, but by not using words I didn’t have something to fall back on when something in the storyline was unclear. I ran into this problem a couple of times where someone didn’t understand what was happening throughout the comic. If I used words, I could have simply changed the language in each scene to explain the images in a clearer way. Instead of having words to fall back on whenever there was a confusion in the storyline, I had to entirely discard and redo certain panels.
I don’t think Senior Project really influenced my ideas for my future. I think by experiencing a studio space full-time I’ve confirmed a feeling I already had: I want to have art be something I can do whenever I need to escape from my current situation. I quickly realized that I don’t want this as a profession because I feel my capabilities are harmed by the pressure of deadlines. Also, throughout the process, I would get into these stages where I felt like I couldn’t work and I end up staring at a blank page. I think this happened to me so much because when there were deadlines and expectations that I put on myself, the entire project became less fun. Art is very important to me, and it’s something I want to do for the rest of my life, but I don’t ever want it to become boring.
The most rewarding part of my Senior Project was looking at the work I produced at the beginning compared to the work I produced towards the end. I realized that I haven’t done much practice with composition, hence why I struggled with it so much during this project. But when I saw the compositions of my drawings from the beginning to the end and compared them, I was very satisfied with my work.