Antlers comic by Alice

In my Language Arts class we focused on wisdom tales. Wisdom tales are short stories that tell a moral. Some wisdom tales you might know are Echo and Narcissus, Amazing Grace, and Paca and Beetle which is a story that is similar to The Tortoise and the Hare. At the end of this segment, we were assigned to make a comic about one of the stories we learned. 

The story I chose to make into a comic was Antlers. This story’s moral is that there’s always a use for something to summarize the story a stag loved how beautiful his antlers were but hated how skinny his legs were. Moments later, a hunter’s arrow flew by causing the stag to get scared and suddenly get caught in tree branches. If it weren’t for the stag’s legs he would have not made it our alive. In the end, he states that in times of danger they serve him well (they = legs). I chose this story because I thought that the moral was really important and because it seemed easy to narrate.

Before this project started, an illustrator named Brittain Peck came to talk to the whole class of sixth graders. He taught us about tricks we can use in our comics to help as well as who he is and what he does. Brittain Peck is an amazing illustrator some tips he taught us was to: 

1. Be thoughtful of your background. You can use the background as another way to illustrate where the setting is.
2. Use simple shapes to help draw objects.
3. Placing!!! Placing is really important if you want your readers to feel like something that they’re looking at is really small or really big compared to something. 

Now you might be asking what apps I used to draw the comics? Well, count yourself lucky because I’m going to tell you. The app I drew all the pictures on was Sketchbook. Sketchbook is a great app to illustrate pictures because there are are so many different materials the app imitates and you can get more by tapping on the figure above the “whatever material you’re using” on the top left hand side and then scrolling on the popup. The app I used to create the comic and put it together was Comics Life 3. This app has layouts already made for your illustrations, themes, onomatopoeia boxes for your narrating and texts for thoughts and speech bubbles. Two tips you can use for this app is pressing the paintbrush on the top right hand corner to get backgrounds and by pressing the + in the same corner you can add onomatopoeia, arrows/shapes, and pictures. I really recommend these great apps.

In conclusion I want you the readers to…

1. Look at some of Brittain Peck’s work 
2. Read some Wisdom tales 
3. Check out Sketchbook and Comics Life 3