Comics
In our 6th grade Language Arts class, we read these short stories called Wisdom Tales. What are wisdom tales? Wisdom tales are stories that have some sort of moral lesson that goes with it. An example of a moral is love yourself and the story that goes with it is about a deer that doesn’t like its legs. When it gets shot and its antlers are stuck, the only thing that can get them out is its wonderful legs. This is just one example of wisdom tales; it can also be something like the tale of Echo and Narcissus. Then we picked one wisdom tale and created a comic based on it.
Now while yes, some people in our Language Arts knew how to draw amazing comics, but most people didn’t. So we had a student’s parent Mr Brittain Peck come to our school and talk about some basic but mostly important things about drawing. One of the most important lessons I think we learned was perspective. About how just perspective can change a whole image. The example we used was Little Red Riding Hood. At first the wolf was the mere size of a bush but after a little perspective change it was the size of the trees and you knew that he was big, bad, and scary. So perspective can change the way you look at the picture and what catches your eye, such as the big things.
For my story, I chose Feathers. It is a story about a girl who spreads lies through the town. When the rabbi finds out about her, she is brought upon him for justice but the rabbi had an idea. He gave her a pillow that was full of feathers and told her to rip it open in the town square. Come back when you have all the feathers. She did as he said and ripped it open in the town square. Feathers went everywhere and flew across the town. She tried but she couldn’t retrieve all the feathers. She went back to the rabbi and told him the news. The rabbi told her that these feathers were like your lies. Once you tell the lies and open the pillow it isn’t possible to get your words back. So be careful what you say and from that day on she didn’t spread lies anymore.
For this project, we were able to use whatever online drawing app we wanted. I chose Sketchbook because it has a lot of great tools that make drawing and tracing even coloring a lot easier. After I had drawn all of the comic squares I needed somewhere to string them all together. That is where Comic Life 3 comes in. Comic Life 3 is an app where you can choose from many different comic pages so that your story can be exactly how you imagined it to be. You can even customize the page color the text boxes anything you want to customize.
All together this project was a really fun way to put together what we have been learning with morals and make it something that we can really enjoy.