There were almost no requirements to this essay. It is supposed to be about a piece I created and have a thesis. Those were the only guidelines.Katie Cohen
Janice Lee
Graphic Texts
1 December, 2014
Final Project
Before I even realized what my final would be, I was considering this woman who created delusions to cope with her memories. The woman's memory would grow from a delusional state to a consciousness where one is aware of the harsh realities that many people face. The comic is supposed to take the reader on all these weird adventures like shrinking down into a tiny person who dives into Grapefruit Land where she is queen.
My idea of this girl stemmed from an interest in people that create alternate realities through certain types of meditation and lucid dreaming. While I was at a therapeutic boarding school in Maine, I was assigned to read and do exercises in this book called Thoughts and Feelings. In one of the exercises, the reader is instructed to close his/her eyes and imagine a negative memory. The reader is then told to imagine the same negative memory, but this time with an alternative ending. The reader is advised to choose an alternate ending that he or she would have preferred. This exercise is supposed to be repeated every couple of days.
Sometimes I would practice this exercise, but it would only work occasionally. People underestimate a lot of factors when they first decide to do these exercises. A lot of thought, energy, and focus is required to recreate a memory. Because of this, one must be committed to taking the proper amount time to lay down and try to do the exercise. There are a lot of memories that I wish I could change, but only a few that are so emotionally scarring that I would be willing to take the time and energy to change them.
Lucid dreaming is an alternative to doing meditation exercises. A lucid dream is one in which the person who is asleep realizes that he or she is dreaming. People lucid dream for so many reasons. Some people lucid dream to create entirely new memories and others to set aside the limitations of reality. Like everyone else, I get really frustrated with the limitations of reality which is why I am so interested in the different way in which people can defy these limitations. I made my comic have multiple alternative endings because alternative endings defy reality.
While researching lucid dreaming and memory meditation, I looked at more dramatic and exaggerated cases of people that recreate reality for themselves. I found most of these dramatic cases in cinema. In Shutter Island and Fight Club, the main characters both create an alter ego subconsciously to escape reality. Instead of creating an alter ego for my main character, I wanted to create a crazy alternate universe with several different worlds for my character to escape to.
While thinking about what I wanted to do with my project, I was reading Galerie de Difformite which made me investigate and research the butterfly effect. By definition, the butterfly effect is when "the delicate reliance on initial conditions in which one small change can result in large differences in the future. An example of this would be flipping a coin. The way the person holds with coin and the force that this person may choose to exert on the coin can have many results. Another example is in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless mind when Joel wakes up and decides randomly to hop on a train to Montak instead of going to work. This small decision changes his life, just like every small decision. There are hundreds of possibilities and paths that one can take. Throughout my project I wanted to convey how delicate every decision is.
Unfortunately, creating each comic takes a very logical and mindful way of thinking and working. I do not feel like my brain is really trained in those ways just yet. I have never tried making a comic in my life, so this was a challenge for me. Through my process I learned that there are so many decisions a person can make and so many ways to make the process more efficient. I went into this project with basic knowledge of Photoshop and some drawing experience. I was not able to take short cuts because I just did not know how. This experience and knowledge was really helpful to my process and I think that these skills were strengthened over the course of my comic.
The process for the first three pages of my comic was complicated. I started off with a sloppy pencil drawing that I then scanned and traced that drawing on Photoshop. All my lines were straight instead of rounded, so I was mostly using the pen tool to trace of and clean up lines. The more I used Photoshop, the quicker I became because I learned to use all of the shortcuts. After I cleaned up the lines I would add color. Choosing colors was the easiest part. I chose colors that would contrast each other nicely. I was moving towards brighter imagery. Some objects were reused in different strips like the grapefruit.
If I could do anything differently, I would create the whole comic first on a piece of paper before using Photoshop. Focusing on one box in the comic for long periods of time makes me forget about continuing the others.
Overall, I think that my final was a success. Through my process I was able to explore the relationship between reality and false perceptions.
