Assignment for Wednesday 10/19/16

Hello Students,

I was hoping to be back today but I am still sick. Please read these instructions carefully and begin to generate some ideas.

Comic Exercise 1:

In this writing exercise you will imitate a comic strip of your choice. Search google or go to your favorite resource for comics. You can also take a look at bizarro.com or peanuts.com. The important part of searching and looking at comics is finding something that you like. The idea is to work with a comic that fits with your own sense of humor. When looking for a comic you want to finding something that has between 1 and 4 panels. Like this:

After you have chosen a comic the next step is to generate ideas about how you could modify the comic so that it becomes something new while still retaining the “spirit” of the original. Sometimes in the process of writing and re-writing the essence of the original is lost. That's okay if that happens because in the end, the purpose of the imitation is to help you generate ideas. If the process happens to lead to something entirely different from the original then it ceases to be an imitation but it still counts as a new joke. In the end what you need to do is write a lot of comics and eventually you'll have one that really stands out. That will be the comic that you will animate. 

I really like the New Yorker comic. The joke is simple and I could immediately think of many different ways to modify the comic and turn it into something new. 

When I saw this comic I knew that if I just thought of a list of different animals I could probably come up with scenarios where one of the older animals was complaining about the younger generation. So I came up with a list of animals I might want to use:

1. Birds
2. Raccoons
3. Dogs
4. Mice

I started with Raccoons. I thought to myself, what do raccoons do on a regular basis? Well at least some of them try and get into trash cans. So then I thought about older raccoons complaining about the younger generation and how they didn't “work” for their food. I took some time to draw up the comic. You can also use toondoo for this. Here is the comic that I made that imitates the New Yorker comic:

To show that the younger raccoon didn't work for his food I had him carrying some fast food in a paper bag. You can see that while the theme of older vs younger generations is still in the comic, the story is totally different. A lot of artists love to imitate because they can find things that they like and then use them as a jumping off point for their own creations.

Here is the same comic, but this time I made it in toondoo:

As you can see the result is not as nice as the original drawing. It's also a little harder to convey the idea but the toondoo still took one quarter of the time compared to the original drawing. Toondoo is great to test out ideas and see if they work before you draw the cartoon.

Your Assignment:

Find a comic that you like and imitate it in some way. Write down your ideas regardless of whether or not they are good or bad. Write EVERYTHING down. Use Stick figures in Sketchbook Pro or take advantage of Toondoo.com. Try and keep things simple. The idea is more important than the final product. Don't be afraid to make mistakes. Mistakes are helpful in the creative process.  

You will turn in your idea to the dropbox. If you use toondoo you can email me the file. It needs to be an image. I do not want a text file.