p r o j e c t • 1


Duration: approximately five weeks. Due date to be announced.

DESCRIPTION:

This first project will be executed with simple, traditional materials. The end product will be a five-page comic story. Assign yourself a speaking part in your story, making yourself a recognizable character. "You" need not have a major role. Artists, writers and filmmakers from the dawn of time have included themselves in their work as characters. Werner Rainer Fassbinder, the German film director, for example.

The theme of your story: DANGER.



DANGER! POZOR! ATTENTION! ¡PELIGRO!. . . as living beings, we encounter danger every day. From tsunamis to fratricide to abduction and rape to hazardous intersections to boiling water or hot oil splattering from a frying pan, from insult and disappointment to psychological abuses of all sorts, greater and lesser dangers are all around us.

Remember: Stories as such do not exist in the real world. We create them. We impose narrative structure on experience or imagination in order to create a story. You're already very familiar with this structure:

• Beginning
• Middle
• End.

CONSTRAINTS:

• Every student will be working on paper of approximately the same size, in a proportional ratio of 2 to 3. In other words, we'll all work on 11 x 14 paper. Make your image area 8.5 x 13". Or consult a proportional wheel and choose another size proportional to 8.5 x 11.
• All art will be executed in sharp black-and-white or in grayscale with a range of tonality.
• Every page will be multi-paneled, with a minimum of 6 panels per page, except the first and last pages.
• Acceptable media for this project: India Ink. Pencil. Brush. Dip-pen.
• All your pages will work together as one story.

Story and art are equally important.

END PRODUCT: A BOOK.

We will scan and compile all pages to produce a book. Sometime over the next few weeks, I'll ask you to scan and add color to one of your frames. Each artist will be represented on the color cover of the book with his or her frame.