Reflective Memo

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The artwork for these comics was probably the hardest thing I had to do. I would not really consider myself as an artist and drawing people and animals are probably the hardest ones to do. My first comic had people in almost every frame and my second comic had my dog or cat in every single frame. I think that this class really made me try a lot harder on my drawings compared to anything else. I wanted my artwork to be presentable and I didn’t want to use pictures because I wanted to actually attempt the artwork as best as I could. Even though my art skills aren't the very best I wanted to try so that way it really is my own work no matter how funny looking my dog came out!

Doing comics also made me improve on other skills such as using multimodal literacy. This class helped me try to understand and expect what a comic book reader would want to see; so my audience was a very big factor. In class when we got to see everyones Comic 2 Projects, there were ones that were sad, evil, happy, funny and some just really simple; all of the ones I saw were in their own category and had their own audience that they were targeting. Targeting a certain audience was an area that all my english classes at UNM have touched on so far and I think that is really a key factor in creating some good work. In the area of writing, I don't think I improved too much on that because my comics pretty much didn't have words. I’m not the best at making short stories or poems so with our free range of options for the comics, I chose not to have very many words. My plan for my two comics was that my pictures would tell the story and let people use their imagination a little more. Mainly, I really improved on creating my work to fit an audience and creating my own artwork to the best of my abilities.

Finally, this class was definitely an experience for me and I don't regret any moment from it. I actually learned things from this english class that I can take from and use it throughout college and maybe even my career. I know now that there are many genres of comics that aren't all about superheroes and aren't just all in the newspaper. I learned that there are some graphic novels out there that are really interesting and are just as complex as a very long book novel. There are many things that I can take from this class just as common knowledge now and I really love a class that I can truly show my own ideas rather than just doing research papers. In all, I am very glad I got to take this class because it was a great experience to look into the comic book world.