Out of Time: Time on the Page

September 12, 2023

For this project, we were asked to design and illustrate a sequential piece of art that depicts an event or experience that shifted our life’s direction. I brainstormed my idea and composition in my sketchbook before starting on the final project. I thought of two ideas, both revolving around pets. One was about one of my dogs who passed away, and the other was about getting a second puppy.

I decided on the experience I detailed at the top of the page, which was when one of my dogs, Gabbar, passed away in March 2023 from cancer. He was diagnosed in December and was given less than 2 months, so it was expected. Still, he seemed perfectly healthy and upbeat until the day of his passing, so it felt like time passed extremely fast that day, even though we all knew the day would come. In order to represent the passing of time as well as my emotional state, I chose to have the images I illustrate fade into the background, as my dog has slowly been fading from everyday memory, unfortunately. By making each panel in the sequence smaller and darker, I wanted to express my anticipated despair and eventual grief. I also decided to include dates (“MAR 18”, etc.) to emphasize the passing of time, as well as to memorialize the last few days of his life.

I chose to ink this illustration as sequential art makes me think of traditional comics, and I also wanted to use solely black and white visuals. I used smooth bristol paper and measured out the panels to be centered and evenly spaced out gutters. I went in with a mechanical pencil to sketch out each memory that I chose and then used pen nibs and India ink to ink the panels. After I had all my pencil lines covered with ink, I decided to cut my paper to make the composition longer and more spread out. After cropping the page, I used a brush and covered the background with ink to emphasize the fade into nothingness. The paper did end up warping, so before my second coat of ink, I taped the paper down to minimize future warping.

Final version (physical) before Adobe edits

After I finished the inking, I photographed and scanned the piece using the Apple Notes app in order to get crisp lines. Uploading it into Adobe InDesign, I knew I wanted to emphasize the passing of time, so I decided to make the piece feel more drawn out by increasing the gutter sizes which physically elongated the sequence. I also made the black background more evenly colored since the ink had a slight glare on it from the photograph. I debated on adding color in this step as well as the previous step, but I think it would’ve taken away from the dramatic effect of the black-and-white visuals and storyline. I had hand-written the text with a white gel pen on the piece before scanning it in, but I decided to redo it digitally in InDesign to make it slightly more crisp and graphic.

The above image on the left shows what the initial upload looked like once I separated each panel into its own image. I then measured and moved each panel to have a larger gutter width than the original piece. The image on the right shows the addition of typed text.

Final (digital)

Looking back, I do like how this piece turned out. I’ve been wanting to express how I feel about my dog’s passing for a while, but never had the motivation or ideas to do it, so this project worked out in many ways. It does feel very surface-level for my personal history with art-making, and I probably could’ve fleshed out the concept with more panels or more emphasis on the change in emotion, but I think it’s a good starting point for where I want to go next; it made me understand just how deep I want to go with this concept. One thing I have reservations about is the last panel with the infinity sign over it. I wasn’t sure how to go about that panel, and because of that, it seemed like an elementary element to me. Nevertheless, I couldn’t come up with a replacement for it, so I kept it, as I think it still adds to the idea of how life kept going after he passed, but the place he had in my heart for the past 6 years was now empty. I also wish I could’ve found a better font for the text; a small self-critique, but I prefer my handwriting over the typed script as it feels more personal. Overall, it was nice to go back to inking and exploring comic-like works, and I’ve always loved representing personal narratives via art. I’d say this project was a success for my first one at Parsons.