Mixed Media Comic
The Mixed Media Comic is a project where we needed to make a four-page comic about a person significantly different from ourselves and use textures and photographs for parts of the comic in order to make the whole look of the comic more interesting.
It was a cool project since it pushed us as writers to make a story about somebody real who has a different worldview from ourselves which is something a lot of comic artists struggle with.
The mixed media element was also interesting as the original prompt involved making a four-page comic normally and a mixed media cover but we combined the two so we could have extra practice with the method and have a page count that we could make into an anthology.
Planning
I decided on a story about my Grandmother. I chose to make a comic about her as a person and how she met and married my grandfather. I chose her because she's a very strange and intense person and has a lot of skill and ambition but in a very specific way. She's not a person I really relate to but she's a person I respect a lot and I think she's very good at what she does.
My aim was to try and portray how strangely frightening she is while also telling a heartwarming story about how she saw my grandfather across the room at her new job, he was being shown around by the head manager and was very handsome. She turned to her best friend at the time, who would eventually marry my great uncle which I fully believe was another of my grandmother's setups, and told her she'd be marrying the man across the room. She managed to set it up so he'd go to dinner with her and they were married within a year. It's both romantic and terrifying how she managed that.
Once I wrote out the script I thumbnailed the comic and gathered some photos to use as textures including a friend's jumper and I got some references of my grandparents from my sister. I even photographed a real letter she sent me.
My thumbnails needed a lot of refining for the sketch phase because I drew them very small and then put them away to work on other things leading me to forget what some of the drawings were even of, I should have moved faster with this project than I did.
Final Comic
The final Comic is kind of simple but I'm still pleased with how it turned out. It gets across the story I wanted and is easy to read and I liked playing with drawing the colour scheme from the images I used for the textures and working backward from there which led to a lot of blues and peaches. I drew a lot from real photos of my grandparents which I think led to being able to recognise them both when they were young and when they were older.
If I had more space or more time to figure out different layouts I might have wanted to add a little information on them moving into their first house and buying a grammar phone instead of a sofa. It's both cute and shows that while my grandma was first interested in my grandfather because she thought he'd be successful, and he was, she also genuinely loved him.