Part 5 : Exercise - Educational strip

Brief: Produce an ilustrated strip of up to five frames for use in schools, explaining to young teenagers how to cope with puberty. Use metaphor and humour and take care to convey a serious message. 

Provide a single illustration of the character for use on the front cover.


Topic: What's happening to my body, it's all going mad!

I figured that using metaphor would be necessary to communicate something tasteful in a visual way, since that was the brief...

"That is, with visual metaphors, the image-maker proposes food for thought without stating any determinate proposition. It is the task of the viewer to use the image for insight."
(Noël Carroll, "Visual Metaphor," in Beyond Aesthetics. Cambridge University Press, 2001)
[Accessed 15 November, www.http://grammar.about.com/od/tz/g/vismeterm.htm]

Hair in Funny Places by Babette Cole [Accessed 1 November, 2015 www.bookdepository.com]

I find this cover appropriate because it still shows that the pubescent person has the mind of a child, with the metaphor of the bear looking for underarm hair.

Typography: madness,chaos, confusion, youthful, fun, scattered... eg. Grape Blaster and Toonylunes (truetype fonts from dafont.com)
Hand drawn..

Since I am not working in Adobe I copied the above font ideas and drew them by hand. I chose a long skinny font to match the awkward skinny phase boys often go through during puberty.
I chose it to match my character which came about after thumnails and trial and error.

Photo of my feet to help me draw the character's bare feet and this level and angle.

TYPOGRAPHY -What's happening to my body? It's all going MAD

I tried drawing this text onto the character page, and found that I had to move it around with pencil and eraser which got quite messy.

At this stage I would appreciate extra skill in Adobe Illustrator but this slower method will have to do.

I used a 2.0 calligraphy fineliner pen with a slanted nib to alter thickness of letters. I purposefully drew the font in a misplaced way to signify the confusion of puberty.

I still feel the letters are misplaced and would like to manipulate the image on computer if I could.

Very challenging to try and use metaphor to describe candid body functions without offending or trivialising the message. Humour is important, I went through more mental processes with these thumbnails after drawing these. I drew teenagers in the mirror reflecting on future changes, happily. Not sure that would've worked as it became to complicated to run this across the five frames. 

The female puberty chart seemed quite challenging and needed a more sensitive approach. I found it less humerous than a male puberty chart so changed genders.

I worked on a male character for this and got inspiration from the books below. I decided to hand draw the fonts and was inspired after looking at typography on dafont.com.  I drew the word MAN in a heavy font to depict the depth of voice and fully grown male size. I noticed that alot of other OCA students used rich textual descriptions to help their project along. I was surprised as I thought this had to be mostly visual. I kept the text light and fun though, and concentrated on it in relation to what it looks like together with the visuals. 

I changed the character's name to something generic and not easily identifiable with anybody in particular. The fonts were copied from dafont.com. I realised other OCA students are actually way ahead with Adobe Illustrator and InDesign and if I could I would love to scan these and add a gorgeous wallpaper or bathroom tile background to each image then play with spacing for the typography and get that looking right. I'd also love to play with the colour and extrude the texture of the pencil crayons against a solid vibrant colour in the background.

I used colour and the lack of it to depict communication, so: sometimes a lack of colour to focus either in the text or somewhere else important. 

                       

The skew letters are purposeful and the idealised male and female figures were used to show teenagers what the future may bring and that the odd physical phase of puberty passes. I would still like to find a way to scan this into Adobe and update it with technology.