In my Language Arts class, we learned about wisdom tales. These stories are from around the world and teach very important morals. One of the morals from a story called The Tiger’s Whisker was to be patient. We learned about these tales for four months and did a project on a Wisdom Tale we chose. I chose Antlers, a wisdom tale from Greece. I chose this Wisdom Tale because it teaches an important moral in a short story. Even though the story was short, the comic wasn’t. The story is that there was a deer that thought that its antlers were so beautiful and large, but it thought that its legs were ugly and spindly. A hunter tried to kill the deer. It ran away, but its antlers got stuck in some branches, but because of its powerful legs, it managed to get out of the branches and escape from the hunter. The moral of the story is that beauty isn’t everything.

Before we made the comics we had a special visit from a professional graphic designer. Brittain Peck gave us tips on how to draw comics better. One of the tips he gave us was to use simple shapes. One of the ways I used this was how I made my trees. I used a rectangle for the trunk of the tree and a circle for the leaves. Another tip he gave us was to change the size of the comic boxes. I varied the shape and size so that I could include farther out drawings or close ups. 

The tools I used to make this comic were Comic Life 3 and Sketchbook. I made the speech bubbles, comic boxes, and comic format on Comic Life and the drawings on Sketchbook. One tip I learned with drawing on Sketchbook is that you shouldn’t put all of your drawings on one layer. If you put parts on different layers then you can erase parts of one layer and the other layer will not be changed. I’m not good at drawing but this experience helped me understand that you don’t have to be good at drawing to tell a story. I also learned a lot about clearly stating what you want when you draw even if it isn’t a masterpiece.