You have two graphic narrative assignments which are both due by start of class on Monday. If you are comfortable posting a photograph of your graphic to the site before class, that would be great, but it is not required.
ASSIGNMENT ONE: FRAMING OUR MONSTERS
You should make 2-3 panel layouts for your We Monsters autobiographically-influenced graphic narrative that touches in some way upon the idea of monstrosity and adolescence. You should already know what narrative moment you want to communicate. This assignment is asking you to play around with how you will visually frame and layout your story. I’m asking you to use the rulers and pencils passed out in class, to make a clean and legible layout of panels for your graphic. YOU ARE NOT DOING THE WHOLE GRAPHIC. You are just doing the panels, and then adding a kind of mock up stick figure drawing that communicates how you intend to use each panel and how they will speak to each other.
Once you have done one of these, you will then do at least one more for the SAME narrative moment. The moment/story is the same, but you will propose in this layout a different arrangement (placement, size, shape, etc) of panels.
ASSIGNMENT TWO: PICTURING WILSON’S PICTURE
Pay close attention to the details of encounter between Darren Wilson and Mike Brown as the legal record provided in the transcript of Wilson’s grand jury testimony shows (see below image). We focused on page and lines of the description.
Depending on which group you are in (see below) draw a single panel of either the beginning, middle, or end of this story as depicted in transcript. You should not just be replicating the in class example we did. You may decide for yourself what constitutes the beginning, middle, and end moments of Wilson’s narrative. And you should decide how best to represent the portion of the narrative your group’s been assigned to depict.
Where in the above assignment you are working mainly on layout of the panels, in this assignment you are working on composition and arrangement of figures within a single frame. What figures, symbols, lines, colors, shadows, text, and shapes can communicate the part of the story your group is supposed to work on?
Groups A & B: Do beginning of a 3 panel graphic.
Group C: Do the middle of a 3 panel graphic
GROUPS D & E: Do the end panel of a 3 panel graphic.
Some things to keep in mind when drawing your panel:
ON REALISM: Remember that you don’t always have to be literal or aim for realism in graphic novel. Often money is communicated not by pictures of actual crumpled bills, but by a green dollar sign. You can see in the example from class, the hospital is just a rectangle with a red cross like sign on it.
ON COLOR: We have intense affective association with colors. So colors can signify a whole host of moods and feelings and settings. Again you don’t want to think literal here. It’s not important that the shirt is red because it was red in real life (or even in the story), but you might use red to show your character is angry or in the case of the in class example has a fever (which is a mix of literal and symbolic use of color).
ON MOVEMENT: A lot of times movement can be established by repetition of image, or by drawing movement lines that connote the “trace” of where the moving object has just been.
ON BREAKING THE FRAME: The frame of the panel and the “blank” space between the panel are just as much a part of the visual configuration of the story ass the drawing of the protagonist. Having a character fill out the entire frame might make them seem huge or cramped. Having them break the frame might communicate danger or transformation or some disruption of order and move into the liminal. By contrast having a lot of negative space in a frame with a very small picture can communicate emptiness, loneliness, or something hidden and secret.