During my last year studying at Bryn Mawr and Haverford Colleges, I completed a senior art project for my fine arts major. With the help of the fine arts faculty and students as well as friends and family, I was able to finish an entire first issue of a comic series through the medium of printmaking. After declaring my major in my sophomore year, I decided that I would concentrate in printmaking instead of drawing, which was a big challenge as an artist who specializes in illustration. I spent the next 3 years learning different styles of printmaking including etching, relief, and lithography. By the end of my senior year I was very pleased with my decision to go with printmaking instead of drawing because of the amount I learned from the classes I took. I am also so grateful to the teachers who helped me through my printmaking studies, including Professor Hee Sook Kim, and her TAs Anu-Antari Goedhart and Samantha Berg.
The exhibition, which was held from May 14th - 29th of 2021, featured my artwork as well as the senior projects of 9 other art majors. Although, we could not meet as a class or during the exhibition due to circumstances from Covid-19, we went to zoom meetings each week, looked at and discussed our work, and supported each other through the process.
The process of creating this comic started with brainstorming ideas, and then drawing them as small thumbnails while writing potential dialogue on the side. Then I drew each comic page with pencil on ruled comic book paper, and went back over the initial sketches with ink pens. I finished these pages by the end of winter break, and began printing during my last semester at Bryn Mawr. However, before printmaking, I had to scan all of my comic book pages, and edit them with photoshop, as well as add text to the speech bubbles. The cover art I produced was the combination of a past illustration I created in a printmaking class and text I added to the image through photoshop. I chose to work with digital lithography for this project, which required me to scan the original drawings, so I could print them as digital lithography plates. Every plate had a flipped version of each comic page, which I rolled ink on top of, and then put through the printmaking press, so an unflipped version of the image appeared. Each comic book page I completed required multiple plates, so I could add colors to the illustrations as well. I would have to put the print through the press multiple times with multiple plates, so the process could be very tricky and frustrating, due to how long it took, and how easy it was to mess up a print. Printmaking takes a lot of time and patience, but In the end I felt incredibly satisfied and accomplished with my work.
My finished product was a 12-page comic issue (including a cover page) as well as two illustrations of my main characters accompanying it. The comic is based on a story I created called "Evangeline and the Latchkey Kid," and it follows the relationship between a vampire and a young woman in1970s Philadelphia. Although, it was originally created with the intention of being a short story, I now plan for it to be an entire series I want to write, draw, and publish. As I have continued to add to the story, I have created more characters, plot lines, and relationships, and I have delved deeper into the themes of death, grief, and growing up.
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