At the end of these long past few weeks of pushing through to the end of my production, my final product as it stands now is a six page comic illustrated by me, alongside a poem I wrote detailing the most memorable parts of my past three years at college. In all senses, this entire project has been a love letter directed to my friends who feature so heavily in this comic. This comic was made with them in mind but also made palatable to the human experience of finding friends in what was once a foreign environment and it becoming a new home. More than anything else, this project has been a deep dive into the exploration of my own feelings surrounding the college experience, friendship and the idea of change. In turn these feelings have manifested themselves into the finished piece you see before you, expressing in the way I know best, through art, the way I feel as I say goodbye to this era of my life and my relationships

 

This is a project that has been so specifically tailored to a target audience from the very beginning, but along the way i have found ways to make my piece something others can project their own experiences onto. this comic is about the human condition that allowed us all to meet, that's something most people can relate to and in turn find their own interpretation that strikes meaning for them. That's the main thing I wanted this comic to do, I wanted it to have a strong emotional sentiment and have an impact on the people who see it. Most likely, the people who it features are the ones who will naturally feel closest and most intensely about the resulting piece as it is directed at them explicitly. But then others who recognise themselves in the same poetic motifs and symbolism I use, and who feel conflicted over the idea of change, will be able to relate too.

 

Overall, I think my final piece is successful because it colourfully and emotively portrays so many different snapshots of my friendships over the years. I think I creatively combined my own mediums of art with the inclusion of my own poetry, it made the idea feel much more personal to me. Additionally, this is my first FMP that has been wholly original without any fandom input or inspiration from a song or other media. This has all come from my own life and that's something I feel very prideful of. While I do think my comic is largely successful in serving its purpose of being a homage to my college years, a declaration of love to the memories my friends and I have made and a goodbye to this version of us all, I do feel its success was stunted in many ways. Largely one's self-imposed. A problem I have always ran into is creating an idea that sounds doable for the timeframe and then somewhere along the line it becomes so much more convoluted and I put so much more pressure on myself and can't meet my own expectations. I consider myself a perfectionist and I tend to get very caught up in details, and as someone who has quite a detailed colouring style in specific that I chose for this idea, it was a big slower of my pace. Additionally, as this was something I was making for specific people, there was a unique pressure to portray them in a way they would like. I would often overthink and find myself in a trap where I would be ruminating on getting one specific part of the comic right rather than focusing on the overall idea. 

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The production of this comic felt like a new experiment every day. By choosing to incorporate backgrounds that are authentic to the ones in the real life counterparts of the memories I'm representing digitally, I had to spend a lot more time understanding how to make my human subjects fit in alongside the scenery they were placed within. This meant a lot of decision making with my colour choice, making it so the colours in my characters versus my backgrounds weren't too close that they seemed like one in the same, but not too different that it seemed like the characters were just floating on top of the background. Additionally with the backgrounds, this project challenged me to incorporate different times of day and furthermore conveying the idea of time passing throughout several very different panels. As the blending modes and colour effects I used warped a lot of my base colours, my scenes of blue skies would often be washed out to an off-white colour, and warm indoor scenes would turn completely yellow. This is where the fact my shading style being quite complex came in handy, as adding more details and shading to my background, then going in with a brush that slightly blurred everything it went over both made the background look more true to life while still looking stylised and using the colour layers.

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My core idea has stayed the same all the way through, but with so many additional elements that I wanted to play a part in the project, I often found myself lost on what to do next. From the beginning, I wanted a crossover between my literary art and my illustrative art, and that's one of the things that has been the easiest for me to do. While the prose of my poem doesn't match up exactly with the visuals, they're like a narrator talking over the memories in hindsight, adding to the nostalgic feeling. In my project I also wanted to utilise colour for my storytelling more intentionally than ever, pushing myself to use the symbolism of a sunset and its constant death and rebirth cycle to represent the end of college, the comic starting soft and pastel and ending with a bright saturated panel at the end. It's a progression I'm very proud of and it shows just how much I took on board from my research into actual sunsets as well as colour theory. As well as this, I had a very specific art style in mind for this project and it was one that required a lot of time and effort. It was digitally painted in a way, overlaid with crayon style brushstrokes overtop to give a more storybook feel. If I had chosen a much simpler style I would have been able to do so much more with my actual comic's sense of plot, but I felt it would have lost a lot of its overall quality.

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A lot changed with my comic over the course of production, beginning with the obvious one which was having to cut an entire page out during the last week of production, as I realised how little time I had left and how way too utterly drained I was. This meant also cutting out a stanza of my comic and it left me so dismayed, it felt like I was getting rid of so much of the meaning just by shortening the comic slightly and my friends missing out on seeing themselves on an extra couple panels. I know now that my friends just find the fact they're on any panels at all as an amazing thing to see, but I wish they could've seen the comic for what it was fully meant to be. I knew it was a good decision in the end to cut the page out though as I would have only made myself sick with stress trying to rush out a page that I wouldn't even be proud of. Another thing that changed is the format of my pages, around halfway through I realised I disliked how much whitespace there was in between a lot of my panels, which resulted in me completely changing the box compositions to both show more content and also portray a more cohesive story.

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My favourite thing about the final piece is the comparison of the first page to the last page, my art has already changed a lot during this short time and it's evident between those two pages. It feels very representative of the difference between my first year of college and the end of this third one. I'm not the same as I was at the beginning of this project, let alone at the beginning of first year, so to have my comic unintentionally symbolise that is really charming to me. In a similar vein, I really do love how my colouring style has developed over this project, the colours are what bring this entire comic together and the sunset progression is an idea I'm very proud of sticking out until the end. On the other hand, my least favourite part about my comic overall is the lack of consistency between pages. While largely intentional with the colouring choices and the symbolism they represent, the art style seems to constantly shift throughout the pages just due to the nature of time and my art style changing as the project went along. While it isn't necessarily a bad thing, I also know I was able to spend a lot more time perfecting the first couple of pages. I do feel like this was a bad decision in hindsight though because it left me so little time to add that same detail to later pages.

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I think my research into my chosen theme and the subjects and elements surrounding it was very thorough, I am a passionate person to my very core and nothing makes me feel more human than trying to turn my love for people into a tangible thing they can see. For the past three years I've basically built up my own reference material of memories and pictures and videos of my friends and I that I've now been able to reinterpret into still images for a comic, documenting the moments we wouldn't realise meant so much, as if they were already pressed into a scrapbook. Wherever possible, I did research. I looked into poetry and the motifs surrounding love and the themes I wanted to communicate in my own poem, and then have tried to make my comic echo those same themes back. I researched heavily into colour scripting and for the first time actually utilised it as a technique, and it helped greatly in the progression of my comic's colour palette. I analysed different artists and did studies of their art to understand what they did to make their subjects look the way they did. I tried their brush settings and documented my creative process as I tried to recreate their own pieces with my own skills and it taught me a lot. Most obviously I did research into everything surrounding comic making, I had read very few and never made one myself so this was breaking new ground completely. I learnt about webtoons and pacing and how all of the composition rules of photography play into comics and art too and I tried to implement all I learned as best I could!

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I think I planned my project to the best to my abilities, but I also undermined the fact that I would definitely bite off more than I could chew and make the project so much more stressful for myself. While I couldn't have predicted the changes I would need in my production schedule, I think it would've helped me to have an emergency backup schedule for what I could do next if things were really going slow, one that would help me cut any corners I could while preserving my integrity as an artist and being authentic to what my goal was. I think in terms of my research, pitch and treatment though I outlined in as much detail as I could what I wanted to do and what I needed to do it. I just overlooked how much time I had and how fatigued I'd get from constant drawing.

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The most challenging part of this project has definitely been just the sheer amount of different characters, scenes and clothing I've had to draw. While all of my characters are relatively consistent and recognisable between each page, which I'm really proud of, the process of giving them detailed shading on everything from skin to hair to clothes was incredibly tedious across several pages. Alongside this though, deciding to cut out a page was really difficult for me and I almost didn't do it, being stubborn enough to think I could finish the entire page from sketch to full colour in a day. I finally decided to go against that though and take it easy on myself, the lack of one page isn't the defining moment of my comic and no one can miss what they never even saw. This project taught me that I still do have a big issue with focusing too much on tiny details, and making small ideas into ones too big to complete within a deadline. I don't know where to draw the line between pushing my own skills for a challenge and pushing myself beyond my own limits for the sake of perfectionism. I learnt a lot about how to make a comic though, and while this first attempt of mine is a mess in places and somewhat disjointed I've definitely been given a baseline for where I could next go and different ways I could attempt it.

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If I were to redo this project, I think I'd definitely change the actual layout of the comic. I think I'd want to make it into more of an infinitely scrolling webtoon style as that gives me much less to worry about in terms of composition in most cases. I'd also like to maybe even remove the crayon brushstroke style addition as I feel like it makes the panels sometimes look too busy or muddy. It was the alternative to attempting a more traditional gouache style of colouring while retaining the saturated nature of my colour palettes but this is something I could always try again in a different form. I think If I were to change something else about a redo of this project I would also work in more defined stages to make work more easily manageable for myself. I didn't start doing that until very late in production and it made things so much easier that it probably would've allowed me to get so much more done if I had started earlier. This is a project that means a lot to me and holds a lot of meaning, it's something that will outlive the time I've been at college and it's an immortalised visual representation of who me and my friends were at this time. While I'm not proud of a lot of it, I know it's the most passionate I've ever been about a piece of work I've done and it's going to lead me to do so many more things like it.