Project by Onaje G-S (9th grade) and Harry K (11th Grade)
Faculty Advisor: Mark Silberberg
This project was born out of two mission-focused questions that Director of Learning & Innovation Mark Silberberg asked:
- How might we share the school’s rich history in a more engaging way as part of our accreditation self-study document?
- How might we do this in a way that puts our students at the center of this work?
To move these questions from ideas to action, he asked us if we would be interested in taking on this project and transforming a textual narrative of the school’s history and bringing it to life as a comic. We said yes.
Onaje’s reflections on the project:
When I was first given the opportunity to depict the history of LREI, I felt the pressure of the whole school and its history on my shoulders. From forming the plot pyramid with Harry to deciding the race and gender of made up characters, I kept imagining someone who held LREI close to their heart criticizing my depiction of its story. Therefore, half of the battle was mental. Art wise, the struggle was really me having fun with the fundamentals of art. I used watercolor to give the comic the traditional, home-like feel I thought it deserved. LREI and its history is a nostalgic subject for me so I wanted to share that with others. Another element of this comic I took very seriously was the colors. Every paged was heavily planned out based on what story and emotion it was telling. This mindset produced pages that I believe could stand on their own and tell a story. It also gave it the cinematic look I aim for when drawing.
Now that I have finished the comic, as an artist would, I criticize every aspect of it. However, I’m still proud of the ambition, determination and creativity it took to make it. As I look back on the process of making the comic, I remember feeling restricted to solely making realistic human beings. I kept feeling urges to draw crazy looking characters and colors. I had to tell myself that once I finished this comic I could play around with the ideas swirling in my head. Now I am drawing more and more often and experimenting with those ideas. I’m currently on a path to define myself as an artist.
Harry’s reflections on the project:
My involvement with this project was different than that of most projects I’ve done because I didn’t come up with the project and I didn’t have any real control of it. I was brought on to help because I understood the medium of comic books. I sat down with Onaje to write the script and just to give him a sense of how to pace and lay out a comic. We wrote four or five pages during that meeting with a plan for a ten page final script. When Onaje was done with the illustrating, the final story was vastly different from the one that I had helped to write. This created some challenges for the lettering as the illustration layouts were done. This meant that there was no real consideration for the job of the letterer when the scripting and layouts were being done. The large panels were silent and the small panels had many captions. I had to adjust the script accordingly and move some captions around, generally a faux pas but necessary in this instance. Ultimately I was able to finish the story and handed it in. I’m now handling the production elements for our printing project next year.
Below are some of the early drafts of the pages:
Adding color to the cover:
And some additional thoughts from Onaje:
As of now, I have completely inked and watercolored the first page, and have pencilled up to the fourth (out of six) page. Making this comic, and the skills and techniques it required from me, has made me learned and discovered many new things about studio art and how I work as an artist.
Throughout the pencilling of the pages, I felt the need to fully incorporate and embrace the emotions and themes and time periods of each page. I’ve been listening to the music of the decade to feel more connected to the time. I’ve been looking up references of “1920s this” and “1920s that”. I’ve been shading the elements and figures of my comic in a high contrasting way to convey a cinematic feeling.
When I colored the first page, I felt the need to specifically decide what each color should be to balance each other out in the right harmony to achieve the right, uplifting, introductory feeling. From the responses I’ve received from that first page, it seems like I was successful in achieving that welcoming emotion.
So far, this comic has taught me how important emotion is in art.
Here is the finished project:
