Dragon Comic Splashpage

Project: Fantasy Mini-comic

I love dragons. They are one of my main inspirations in my art, and the reason I continue to create during rough patches in my life. Dragons are the type of artistic muse that forces their way into everything, from doodles on homework to classroom projects. During my private art tutoring, I continually exasperated my teacher by constantly “putting a dragon in everything.”

I also love comics. They’re one of the most innovative fields today with the explosion of webcomics, so I was excited to find a course on comics through my residential program at MSU (RCAH). After taking the first course and becoming thoroughly addicted to at least a dozen new comics, I was eager to take a more advanced version of the course during a later semester. As an honors student, I had to develop my own honors courses, so I worked with my professor to study and undertake the beginning of a comic. Needless to say, I found the work to be more difficult than I imagined! I studied longform webcomics like “Rice Boy” by Evan Dahm and “Lackadaisy” by Tracy J. Butler, as well as traditional superhero comics by Frank Miller and Alex Ross, and Scott McCloud’s “Making Comics.”

This piece is my favorite page of the ten I was required to create, and the best example of my multimedia efforts on the comic. Although it is a splash page and not the panel work, it taught me about creative use of sequence, juxtaposition, and composition that came in handy during my work in book layout and graphic design.