Initially, I was struggling to come up with a topic to draw about because we had too much freedom, and I felt that it would be easier if we were assigned a topic. Eventually, I decided to draw inspiration from life. Considering that Valentine is coming, I picked one of my favorite love poems and illustrated it in three panels.
During the process of drawing, I particularly focused on establishing a hazy, ambiguous ambiance. I used pencils as the main media since their pale grey hue naturally possesses a melancholic quality and I could use them to create subtle textures while rendering the clouds. And I erased the outline after filling the interior with shadows to better enhance the haziness of the work.
Creating a triptych seemed like an easy assignment at first. However, coming up with a storyline was a lot more difficult to complete. I had no idea what my storyline should be about. Then I started to think about sloths, but I did not know what I wanted my story to go. Then, I thought about how weird Venus fly traps are. So, I decided to do a triptych about the peculiar nature of how they need more than the nutrients in the soil to satisfy their needs. Making this comic is similar to other writings I have done previously because I had to make sure that it had a beginning, middle, and end.
Coming into this process, I had no idea what sort of triptych I wanted to produce. I think I initially felt limited by the three-square format, and my natural inclination was to craft some kind of joke with a gaffey punchline as seen in traditional Sunday Cartoons like Peanuts or Garfield. However, I eventually veered away from that idea after deciding I would enjoy the creation process a lot more if I pursued a topic I was interested in. I have been thinking about Vincent Van Gogh quite a bit lately. I believe there is something profound about the idea of a man who pursued what he found meaningful despite being overlooked by his peers. Van Gogh completely reframed his mindset. He refrained from concerning himself with his own material reality and began conferring with eternity: how his art will be remembered by those with whom he will never share a day.
My triptych portrays Van Gogh in his asylum room in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, looking out the window at a starry night. Throughout the triptych, I try to establish that what we see and what Van Gogh sees are two completely different things. A one-eared Van Gogh looks into a starry night in the first slide. In the second slide, we see a close-up of his eye and the twinkling reflection of his vision. And finally, a complete starry night on the third slide. Captions at the bottom of each image inform the viewer throughout, both in French and English.
The triptych above is a simple sequence of events. A man is sad, someone lifts up the ends of his mouth into a smile, and he stays there smiling.
When thinking of ideas, I thought about my week and how draining it was. Naturally, I thought that this was what the rest of my semester would look like, and because of this, on a Friday night, I was feeling sad with a bleak outlook on the next few months.
The next morning, I decided to just not be sad. I smiled in the mirror for ten seconds and went about my Saturday morning. Making that small decision to just begin smiling made my day so much better and was the inspiration for the triptych.
I think the minimalist style conveys a strong message to the reader. There aren’t any hidden clues or flamboyant imagery that symbolize something, it’s just telling you “Don’t worry, be happy.”
What if Meursault in L’Étranger became the little boy in Akira Kurosawa’s first Dream? Both works are among my favorites, and therefore I came up with the idea of mixing the two when jogging on the track field this afternoon.
Inspired by A Softer World, I found the challenge of the project is to create interesting three-line poetry and to figure out an image in correspondence. Then, I cropped and drew on the picture to make it a three-panel page. I felt my photo editing skill with Pixlr has improved since last time.
This triptych details the evolution of one’s relationship with food over time – and the social commentaries that come along with it. I tried to add patterned and contrasting narratives within all three panels – the table of food gets progressively smaller as the protagonist gets larger. The text too details a stark change – the character once loved food, now hates it. I made these choice deliberately in an attempt to show as much contrast and dramatic changes as possible in a three panel comic – I think instead of the third panel serving as the main punchline, all three panels and their relationship to each other has meaning on its own. The challenge in this assignment was to compose a meaningful story, and having to keep in mind the overall backbone of change in time. This was how this assignment proved different to other assignments past: there is a much faster progression in a comic strip than simply words or short stories entail, as beginning, middle and end explicitly interact immediately.
In How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels, Paul Karasik and Mark Newgarden carry out an extended discussion of comics through repeated analysis of the single Nancy strip by Ernie Bushmiller from August 8, 1959 (at the top of this post). They explain that “one of the least tangible yet most significant implements in the cartoonist’s toolbox is the varied use of rhythms.[…] One repetition makes a pair. But add another and the repetitions have become a series, the basic building block of all rhythm. A set of three has the smallest number of elements that can establish a pattern (as well as violate it). Three implies more to come” (134).
For this week’s sketch assignment, create your own triptych comic. As you compose your triptych, I most want you to focus on creating a story with a very clear beginning, middle, and end. Your story can be minimalist, impressionistic, comic, dark, weird or whatever you want it to be — but make sure that each panel of the triptych moves that story forward from beginning to middle to end.
You can draw your triptych, or create one using photographs, maybe along similar lines as the webcomic A Softer World, which ran weekly for about twelve years starting in Feb 2003. Emily and Joey published 1248 comics in that time, each consisting of three panels with photographs and words superimposed on them – often it seems to be a single image cropped into three panels, but sometimes it’s three photos taken as a series – and then the title of the comic appears when you hover your mouse over the comic (creating space for a sort of fourth panel or commentary). The comics tend to be quite dark.
I’m looking for compact and playful storytelling through both images and words. It’s an opportunity for you to play with irony, humor, and/or wit.
Add a paragraph reflecting on your triptych comic. What choices did you make in crafting your narrative? Describe the composition process a little bit. What was challenging about this assignment? How is crafting this sort of comic strip different or similar to other writing you’ve done this semester?
