Week 12 _ Introduction for Final Project: Short Story Comic

Today I introduced the final project details and timeline. Details below.

Final Project _ Short Story Comic

Content: Use one of your autobiographical in-class exercises or composition book entries as a “point of departure”. In the end, the proportion of fiction-to-truth is at your discretion. Feel free to diverge from memory in the interest of building a better story. 

 

Form: 2-4 pages, Bristol board (11 x 14”), penciled then inked. Black, white, and gray. 

 

Timeline:  

Weds, 11.19   Full Rough Draft Thumbnails due for small group discussion 

 

Weds, 12.3  Penciled Pages due _ Cold Read group activity. 

 

Weds, 12.10 All pages inked _ Critique

GETTING STARTED

Today we conducted an extended exercise that resulted in a story-skeleton. “It can be helpful to build a story in fragments that tend to knit their own connections.” This approach suggests an alternative to the more traditional method of outlining a story, planning characters, and knowing the end before we begin. There’s something in these exercises that allows for the story to emerge. And allows for discovery (as opposed to preconception and strict illustration) on the part of the artist. 

 

A story creates its own blueprint as it unfolds. As Robert Frost put it: “No tears for the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. For me the initial delight is in the surprise of remembering something I didn’t know I knew.”

You may decide to adapt this week’s exercise into a 2-4 page comic. OR, If you liked the way these exercises generated stories but want to use a different subject/memory go back and apply them to an earlier entry from your comp. book.

 

However you choose to go about this, you need to generate a full rough draft (thumbnail stage) by Weds., Nov. 19. This will serve as the first version for initial feedback from peers during a structured small-group activity.

What do you mean by Full Rough Draft Thumbnails? 

• Use a single sheet of 8.5 x 11” paper for each page of the story. 
• Draw a rough version of the page, broken into panels. 
• Use margin for notes, dialog, important contextual info, transition info, etc.  

Example >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>