Assignment 2A
Figure 1. Chris Ware's 'Building Stories' set cover design
My base inspiration for this project was taken from Chris Ware’s ‘Building Stories’. In which, is a set that takes shape as a box that includes several pages of comic and a few pamphlets. In his project, he tried to tell the stories of the people who live in the building that he drawn. The stories consist of a married couple, a crippled young lady, and an old lady. Most of the stories told, were pretty depressing and unhappy. However, he did made a few comics of a bee whose life was pretty content.
In my interpretation of his art, I tried to make my own set, consisting of 2 comics and one pamphlet. I know that it isn’t as much compared to Chris Ware’s, but I tried to make a few more, to make my set to be more meaningful. However, due to time limits and other subjects’ deadlines, I was only able to make a few comics. In my set, I made the box to be a case with a cover in both sides. Therefore, it won’t matter from which side you open it the inside is still the same. The cover was an abstract collage of letters, images, colors, and shapes so that it has a similar sense of Chris Ware’s cover on his box set. My set has an A3 comic, consisting 2 stories and a pamphlet of the process of the construction of the building. All of the comics were hand-drawn at first, in which later on I would scan, trace, and color it using Adobe Photoshop. The building itself was inspired by my own apartment, in which I lived in, although I took only a part of the apartment into the drawing. My stories in the comic were based on my imagination, no characters and plots were taken from real life. In my best effort, I tried to bring my building in Sydney to have stories of the people who live in it.
For reflection, I maybe could have made more pamphlets to fill up the set. However, I didn’t have time, due to poor time management with other subjects’ assignment. In the comics, I should have chosen better color grades to match Chris Ware’s tone of depression while still having an amusing comic. In the end, I am quite content with my set in this project. I felt that I took most of Chris Ware’s inspiration of a set of comics to tell the story of a building quite well. Furthermore, I sampled his depressed and unhappy ambiance of his story into mine.
Figure 2. Comparison of Chris Ware's comic (left) with my interpretation of the comic (middle and right)
Figure 3. My initial sketch of my comic
The image above shows my initial sketch that i drew in an A3 paper. In which then I would trace it on Photoshop and color it using brush and layers in Photoshop. It took a lot of time to do the tracing and the coloring. Furthermore, I used a digitizer to assist me in tracing and coloring in my laptop.
Figure 4. My pamphlet showing how the building was made from nothing into what it is now.
For my pamphlet, I did it straight on Photoshop, using shapes for the wooden constructions and copied my original building from the comic and pasted it in my comic to ease things up. Furthermore, I colored the skies to be more colorful as the building was built, to show that the construction was a beautiful process.
Figure 5. My cover design using similar styles of Chris Ware's
Reference List:
Wolk, D. 2012, Inside the Box, New York Times, viewed 28 April 2019, <https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/books/review/building-stories-by-chris-ware.html>
Images:
Building Stories, Chris Ware’s Upcoming Imaginative Graphic Novel 2012, Laughing Squid, viewed 28 April 2019, <https://laughingsquid.com/building-stories-chris-wares- upcoming-imaginative-graphic-novel/>
Wolk, D. 2012, Inside the Box, New York Times, viewed 28 April 2019, <https://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/books/review/building-stories-by-chris-ware.html>
