Assignment 10: Your Self Directed Project

After several months and back and forth of feedback, my graphic novel is complete.

Before jumping into the final product, I wanted to go back and look at what advice my tutor had for me before I sent my work off to be printed.

My speech bubbles stood out too much, and overall looked quite distracting— it looked too out of place with the overall style of the graphic novel. I ended up playing around with different grey tones to see what would stand out enough but still suit the style.

From there, I ended up changing the font to make it stand out of the page and so that it can be visible to the audience.

Another thing to note was the page spacing/dimension, with speech bubbles being too close to the edge of the page; to combat this I shifted around the bubbles and font.

After working on these notes, I sent my work to Mixam and waited for the final result.

When the day finally came, I was so excited to see how it turned out. It was much better than expected, and I was so overcome with excitiment that I posted a video of my achievement online. The following day however, I took time to read through the book and that’s where I saw the errors.

When redrawing the speech bubbles, I incorrectly drew speech bubbles going to the wrong character, making the story a little confusing at times. I was very frustrated with myself, despite getting someone to proof-read before sending it off, I still managed to mess up the speech bubbles.

Another issue came up, which was also pointed out by a friend who has her own copy now, was the dimensions. Still after shimming it around the text ended up going into the fold of the pages and would be slightly unintelligible.

I grew annoyed, I wanted this to be perfect right off the bat, but it wasn’t. But after days away from the project, I can see it now as a learning curve. Plus, just because it didn’t work out for the little batch of 5 I had printed, I could always go back, fix the errors and reprint the project.

Overall, I still do love the graphic novel, I love the blend of ink and charcoal; I’m very happy with how it was drawn, not realistically but convincing enough. I like the story idea, and the characters. I’m very happy with the end result.

Getting feedback from my friend, she gave me solid feedback, with what was said previously, but also expressing the desire to hear the story of the little girl in the story.

The timeline set out at the beginning of the project was still very ambitious of me and because of that the end of the project I got extremely burnt out. I struggled with motivation (as said previously), but understanding now, how it feels to see you project to the end has made me really excited to work on more projects like this.

Below is a flick-through of my project, I hope you enjoy.

https://youtu.be/nX3iEV1k2QY?is=jVgGRAFVMtfULunr