Assignment 6: Empowerment
- Abbie Vidler
- 6 days ago
- 5 min read
Brief
For this assignment, choose a social movement that holds personal interest or significance to you and create an illustrative piece in response, that could be utilised within the movement in some way. This could take the form of an object carried during a march, a poster, a t-shirt design, a costume, a zine, or any other piece of paraphernalia that effectively communicates the essence of the movement or helps to garner support.
Idea
Originally, I was going to do a zine, however, when I was reading my weekly webtoon (online comic) I thought, "why don't I use a webtoon format?". With perfect timing too, recently David Attenborough turned 99 and advocated for the life, talking about wildlife, the environment-- our entire world and the damage we are causing. Therefore, I have decided to create a webtoon/online zine, to reenforce this idea, creating an online zine means that I am not creating waste or using up paper to print.
All in all, I will be creating a webtoon on ways to help our ocean.
Research
I want to make sure I can gather as much as I can understand about how we can help our oceans, looking into what we can do to help, and look into what it could look like if we improved our oceans.
Ways to help the ocean:
Conserve Water
Reduce Pollutants: so using products that aren't toxic and properly cleaning and disposing of "herbicides, pesticides, and cleaning products".
Reduce Waste: Use up products and recycle them if possible, food waste to be disposed of in a waste bin or use as compost.
Shop with care: buy less plastic products, excess clothing-- donate to charity or sell rather than bin. Avoid overconsumption, instead of buying another of that particular thing maybe DIY your current item-- or practice minimalistic lifestyle.
Reduce pollution: Invest in an electric car (if financially plausible for you), carpool or ride a bike".
Use less energy: Make sure electrical devices are turned off (not on standby), and even unplug. Use energy efficient lightbulbs and "don't overset your thermostat".
When fishing, "follow "catch and release" practices" to keep more fish alive.
"Practice Safe Boating" by anchoring in "sandy areas", this is to make sure coral reefs and sea grasses aren't disturbed.
Respect the sea wildlife (of course).
Volunteer!
What is happening to the ocean?
There are a multitude of things that are damaging our oceans both the water and the wildlife that live in them, costal populations are being threatened as the sea levels rise. Oil spills, factories and industrial plants pollute the oceans and cause distress to sea life. Sea life are also at threat because of overfishing, causing marine life to slowly die out and eventually in the future go extinct.
There are ways that we can fix this that don't just involve our individual actions, we can advocate for "marine parks to protect biodiversity", with fishers to adapt their way of working to integrate "conservation efforts"-- as well as reduce hunting of unique marine life for unnecessary measures. 2
What would it look like if we improved our ocean?
By improving our ocean, we can look to improve climate change since half of our oxygen "comes from the natural processes of ocean plankton"; and reducing pollution by taking in the "excess heat and carbon dioxide in our atmosphere". We could see a balance in nature's life cycle of food, water and air that all life needs to live fruitfully.
We could see a cleaner ocean, with cleaner air and a more sustainable living conditions for life on Earth. 3
Creating a online zine (using Webtoon)
I'm using webtoon in particular as it is the most popularly used site for creating comics/manga/zine around the world and for anyone to create.
One thing I need to remember when I'm designing the layout and overall idea of this zine is to have the story/panels stacked up to down, a long strip of comic that will be scrollable when viewing. However, I have seen cases where their is a program that automatically lines up any pages that aren't in the correct format.
In most cases it's all done digitally, however it's all determined on how my experimentation and planning goes that it may be done traditionally converted into digital. 4
Mood board
Thumbnailing/Sketches/Fonts
Process + Video Process
I did traditional inking on Bristol paper then I scanned the images and digitally converted them into procreate where I tested so colour ideas. I remembered that I really liked a colour palette from my mood board and decided to use the similar colour scheme to finalise the comic.
Final Result
Webtoon Link
To see how it would look on the platform on Webtoon click the link below!
I also had to create a few thumbnails, so I played around and created the following:
Evaluation
For this assignment I had to create a project that brought awareness to a social issues, I choose environment and specifically the ocean. I did some research to help me include it into the main text of the web comic and used both traditional and digital processes to complete this piece.
I was really excited going into this and I was extremely happy with the end result, I did struggle at first with the initial scare of figuring out how the text would lay out-- however I just kept powering through. I got advice from my Dad who does print to figure out text and font, and to keep the web comic consistent visually I used the same font throughout however playing with different thickness.
For the composition, I started out with making the fishing rod lead our eyes and then the bubbles under the water, I was attempting to do it subtly but I think I made it a bit too obvious. The colour scheme is interesting but I worry that the pinks lead you eyes the wrong way or stand out too much.
I liked doing the webtoon format, it was a nice of pace by doing it all on one canvas, although I did have some difficulty formatting it when transferring from traditional to digital.
I feel like the warm up drawings allowed me to build up a better plan and testing fonts out by hand also gave me lots of ideas, the final font is decent its readable but I don't know if it's fun. When I got feedback of the font this was the one chosen the most.
For the thumbnails I wanted to keep it consistent with the comic, so I used elements from the comic to be integrated with the thumbnail.
Overall, I am happy with the end result.
1 U/A, National Ocean Service 'how can you help our ocean?', U/A. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/ocean/help-our-ocean.html Accessed May 15, 2025.
2 U/A, National Geographic 'Ocean Threats', U/A. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/article/ocean-threats Accessed May 15, 2025.
3 U/A, The Nature Conservancy ' Conversing Our Ocean', U/A. https://www.nature.org/en-us/what-we-do/our-priorities/protect-water-and-land/land-and-water-stories/protecting-our-ocean/#:~:text=The%20ocean%20is%20the%20heart,the%20backbone%20of%20our%20economies. Accessed May 15, 2025.
4 S-morishita, S-Morishita Studio 'Creating Your First Webtoon: A Beginner's Guide to Tools, Format, and Platforms. https://www.s-morishitastudio.com/creating-your-first-webtoon-a-beginners-guide-to-tools-format-and-platforms/ Accessed May 15, 2025.
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