How are you exploring your essential question; is it different from what you expected? If you don’t feel like you’re answering your essential question, what is happening that’s different from what you expected? 

I have been exploring my essential question by making my own comic strip and reading comic books/graphic novels that other people have made. I think that I have been exploring this question in the way I expected to, but I also continue to be surprised by what I am learning. There are so many important aspects of comics and sequential storytelling that I didn’t know about before I started my senior project. I found that creating comic art is a lot more complicated than I originally thought it would be and more time-consuming and more mentally intensive.

Are you surprised by any of the challenges that you’ve faced so far? How have you met those challenges and what can you do going forward to deal with them?

The largest challenge I have found myself facing is the process of creating my first comic. I had no idea how long it would take me to thumbnail out my story, or how many drafts of the thumbnails I would need to make. I meet those challenges by focusing on my comic as closely as I can; when I thumbnail I try to make the scene have significant details while also making sure that it isn’t too complicated. When I meet with James, I always take a lot of notes on his comments and critiques about my work. This is useful because when I am working at home, I revise what I have drawn according to the comments I was given that I feel are most important. A piece of wisdom that I am constantly considering is how readers should be able to understand my story without any words, meaning that my pictures should tell the story by themselves.

Writing on your essential question: What have you learned about your essential question so far? What further questions do you have? and/or Has your essential question changed? If so, how?  What do you want to know more about? 

I have learned that answering my essential questions takes much longer than six weeks to answer. When I first thought of my idea for my senior project, I had very naive ideas about how long it would take for me to write an entire comic book. Originally, I planned to only spend the first two weeks thumbnailing my comic strips for the book and spend the rest of the time finalizing and coloring it. Now, as I have been through the first 2 weeks of my senior project and I am still finishing the thumbnails for my first two pages of my comic book, I realize that I probably need a few months to finish a comic book rather than a few weeks. Most of my questions about my essential question are about the process of making comic books: How many thumbnail drafts am I supposed to do before I can start working on the real thing? How do I figure out a color scheme for my comic, and do all of the comic stories in one book need to have the same color scheme? If one of your comic strips is wide, can you also have long comic strips in the same book? How do you decide what parts of the story are part of a chapter? How do you divide up chapters in comic books?