Final Technology - Rich Likes Crack

I am beginning to think that this project might be an awesome idea for students…if you spend an entire semester on it.

In an attempt to illustrate this story quickly and professionally, I had hoped to forego my usual style for the sake of saving time. The above image is the type of work with which I am most commonly associated: figurative work, relatively 3 dimensional renderings, done in ball point pen. The reason I did not want to do this particular project in this style is because it takes me forever to create the images; it is a very time consuming and laborious process. Thus, I have explored with varying levels of success the following programs. Hopefully they can be of some sort of use to others in their educational ventures:

1 – Bitstrips – This vile program littered my Facebook wall for months with pointless cartoon memes of people I knew. But it seemed to have all of the qualities I needed in that you can easily generate highly customized characters and, to an extent, manipulate them and their surroundings. Unfortunately, it is still not customizable enough to where you can do a complete narrative. The situations are all very bizarre and specific; I saw my illustrated self attempting to rob a bank in a “Mission Impossible” fashion. Once placed in these situations, you can really only make subtle adjustments such as the movement of your hands and the direction of your eyes. Overall, Bitstrips is as not-awesome as I always knew it was.

2 – Strip Generator – While this program is pretty intuitive, it is also fairly limited. You can create extremely basic black and white characters, or you can choose from a catalog of pre-made characters. For backgrounds, your characters are just sort of left floating in a white void. Your only means of incorporating spatial elements is by choosing from a limited selection. Depth can be created only by forced perspective, shrinking and enlarging the objects. However, this website could be really useful for storyboards. You can save it as a PDF and print it, and you can incorporate a number of customizable frames. You are, however, limited to one page.

3 – ToonDoo – This program is actually pretty amazing, and is one I would actually consider purchasing for my students’ use. You can create your own Characters and customize them even more than you can in Bitstrip. Also, you can make as many characters as you want, and you have a wide range of things that you can either choose from a catalog, or just create something if it isn’t available. You can save your projects, download them, edit them later. All in all, this one gets a 10 out of 10 from me. The only thing I don’t like is that you can’t have the characters turn their heads to interact with each other. In other words, all of the characters have to be staring face forward, which makes creating a narrative a bit difficult. Below I have included an image of a potential layout for my book.