The Chapbooks Are Finished!

Yes- at long last, the chapbooks are done, and it is a wonderful feeling. Not only are they done- they're awesome. They're bound together with string at the spines. I used a needle and thread to do it- that's dedication, right there.

My only real regret is that I couldn't get the cover to cover the entire cover page. And don't think that I didn't try. I tried every button I could see and printed every which way and researched everything and did all I could do. It's just a combination of Microsoft Word not being Adobe InDesign and my printer not being a professional printer, I think. But I care very little about it at this point. I'm very proud that I figured out how to get the document to print like a booklet, with the pages matching and front-and-back and all that. I used the "book fold" setting in the page layout area and printed it on both sides with it flipping on the short side. Worked like a dream. Folding and binding were different stories. But now it's done!

And now that that's done, I can finally focus on studying for my American Lit final, which is going to be exponentially harder.

Always With The Technical Difficulties

Too bad it's not called "Red Justice." Guess I'll be going out to buy some more printer ink.

Blue Justice

It is with a sore and cramping hand that I type this blog post because I have been drawing for (I kid thee not) the past six hours. I've been making the cover for my previously-mentioned poetry chapbook, and I was so excited about it that I inadvertently spent all day doing it. It's kind of sad, because the artwork really doesn't have to be that good and I've got other things I could be doing, but... Man, I'm just so excited about this.

FEAST YOUR EYES!!!

Beautiful, isn't it? *sniffle*

Tomorrow I'll print out the pages of poetry and bind them together with this as the cover. I researched comic book covers when I was making the layout for this and also referred to my copy of Stan Lee's how-to book. Needless to say, I have not yet mastered the comic book method of drawing people, but I incorporated a few elements of the Marvel style into the design for this character.

This poem is sort of what I think a comic book would look like if it was translated into poetry. It's told from the point of view of the police officer on the cover. She's only called by her name once in the poem; most of the time all the characters are referred to as "he" or "she" except when it gets too difficult to discern who is who. All of the dialogue is in italics and without quotation marks.

That's something new for me, really. As a general rule, I'm very adamant about having quotation marks and I usually roll my eyes at people who feel they are too artistic to use them (to be fair, I usually write prose), although after trying it, I can understand better why people elect not to use them. In this case, I feel like it helps the poem flow better. If it were a comic, you'd be able to tell who was saying what without clunky tags like "Officer Coulson said." I feel that if I were to put names in this poem, the characters would be tripping over their own names. It's too fast-paced for that kind of business. 

Not calling characters by their names is different for me, too. Usually if I've given a character a name, the narrator calls him or her by that name. I was afraid all the "he" and "she" business would get confusing, but I think it actually worked out pretty well. For the record, Officer Coulson's first name is Renee, and she is named after Agent Phil Coulson of the Marvel Cinematic Universe. She is a badass.

Children's Literature - Now With Doodles

Sometimes I doodle while I take notes. As long as I'm not drawing anything too complicated, it helps me pay attention while the professor's saying something that doesn't need to be written down. In some cases it can also help me stay awake, although I'm proud to say that it's been quite a while since I've fallen asleep in class!

I doodled A LOT in my Children's Literature class. Usually the pictures had something to do with whatever we were reading.

Horatio Alger's Ragged Dick. There's Dick, with his hat, and raggedy coat, and bootblack supplies...

And here's good old Tom of Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

Aaaaand some strange doodles on the back of the Tom Sawyer notes...

Here's Jim Hawkins sailing on the Hispaniola, straight out of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island.

Peter Pan and Tinker Bell from J.M. Barrie's Peter and Wendy.

Swamp-themed (and otherwise) doodles on notes for A Girl of the Limberlost by Gene Stratton-Porter.

More Limberlost doodles.

And I don't even need to say anything because all the info's in the picture.

The Stan Lee Way

This has been a rough week for me. And it's only Wednesday. But Tuesday afternoon while I was sitting in the library and trying to get some work done on a paper before dinner, I got a phone call from my dad. He told me that he'd sent me a package and that it had arrived at my school's package center. Since I was in the middle of a paper and I was pretty sure the package center wouldn't have even processed it yet (sometimes they're slow about that), I thanked my dad and told him I'd pick it up first thing in the morning.

Of course that package didn't distract me at all.

Twenty minutes later, I gathered up my stuff, left the library, and all but ran to the package center. It's nothing to sneeze at when your dad calls you to let you know he's bought you something, especially during dead week when all hope seems lost. "Yeah," the girl behind the desk said as she checked her computer. "It says you've got a book."

A book?

I love books!!!!!!

But what kind of book was it, I wondered? A novel? A textbook? A notebook? A comic book? I wondered all the way home, holding the cardboard box as if it were silver or gold. Something was sliding around in it just a little bit. The box was maybe an inch thick, not too heavy, roughly the length and width of a high school text book... What was it?

I finally got home, plunked myself down on my bedroom floor, and tore the box open.

The first thing I saw: "HOW TO DRAW COMICS."

AAAAAAAAAH!

The second thing I saw: "STAN LEE."

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!

My dad had gotten me this book:

I absolutely love making little comics every now and then, as readers of this blog know, but I just don't have a whole lot of artistic skill. With this book, I can learn to draw comics THE STAN LEE WAY. And that, my friends, is a very good way. Stan is the MAN. I've never read a real comic book, but I know this to be true.

I was very distracted from my paper for about an hour afterward.

But luckily, today I turned in two papers and took a final exam, which means that things are going to be a little slower around here for a few days. I decided to use my newfound free time to try drawing some things. I made up a hero costume using a model the book provided, but it wasn't cool enough to post. I also drew a guy's head.

...I'll get there eventually. I really like the left eye and the bottom lip.

So I'll be playing around with this for a while, especially as I make my poetry chapbook over the next few days (it's due Tuesday... yikes). I suspect it'll come in handy for the graphic novel class I'll be taking next fall. I'm really, really excited about this book! Thanks, Dad!

Random Fact #6

Random Fact #6: William Shakespeare made up the word "bedazzled."

Source: mental_floss
http://mentalfloss.com/article/48657/20-words-we-owe-william-shakespeare

Random Fact #5

Random Fact #5: Paideia is a "system of education and training in classical Greek and Hellenistic (Greco-Roman) cultures that included such subjects as gymnastics, grammar, rhetoric, music, mathematics, geography, natural history, and philosophy. In the early Christian era the Greek paideia, called humanitas in Latin, served as a model for Christian institutions of higher learning, such as the Christian school of Alexandria in Egypt, which offered theology as the culminating science of their curricula.The term was combined with enkyklios ("complete system," or "circle") to identify a large compendium of general education, hence 'encyclopaedia.'"

Source: Encyclopedia Britannica (2008), as found on dictionary.com

Note: I saw the word "paideia" in an article I was looking at while doing research and said something along the lines of "wut." I don't like seeing words and not knowing what they mean. So I looked it up. Because I'm Batman crazy an English major.