This week assignment was about using typography to express feelings from the characters and sounds from the panels in Comics. For that, we needed to create a 4 panel’s story where we could use different kind of word balloons to express the emotional state of our characters.

My story is about a memory. It happens at night in my camp house in Atibaia, I was trying to convince my cousin Dani to go with me to the abandoned house next door. What we didn’t know is that my brother, Raphael, was planning to surprise us there.

Based on the T. C. Boyle’s short story “The Ape Lady in Retirement”, I create this 6 panels resuming the story. I was imagining more details and a darker mood, but I couldn’t approach that with my “drawing” skills.

Anyway, I wanted to maintain the author’s style, choosing the words carefully to represent the whole idea of the short story.

This week at the Comics class, we learned about the different ways in which words and pictures can be combined in the panels. Making use of words and pictures together, we can connect or disconnect ideas, and even introduce to a third implicit idea that has a subtly presence in the story.

We can use some categories that help us to mix words and pictures in the same panel, as: word specific, picture specific, duo-specific, montage, additive, parallel and interdependent. For the homework, we needed to use 4 of these categories (word specific, picture specific, parallel and interdependent) to create 4 different panels, maintaining the same idea or situation.

I always have the same strange dream about elevators, being trapped in an elevador or elevators falling, so I choose this weird nightmares as my “inspiration”.

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I started the Comics class at ITP and this week we had a discussion about communication and simplification. We practice a little of drawing and storytelling started with what came up our mind thinking about the word SCARS and ourselves. Then, the guest speaker & comic book artist Dave Roman came to give us some inspiring thoughts about his world.

As our weekly homework assignment we should take a picture of ourselves and take out everything that we could until we get to our essence, simplifying as much as we could. Since I am not a good cartoonist, I decided to take a recent picture of myself and boil it down using filters in photoshop and the eraser tool.

Original Picture