I moved from Baltimore to New York City in May 2001 and was starting my first year in a graduate program at Parsons School of Design. My thesis project explored interactive layouts in web comics.
The initial shock and the lingering anxiety created by the attacks on 9/11 weighed heavily on everyone and everything. Feeling mentally blocked, I had difficulty developing a narrative for my project. In the end, I made a series of comics that reflected the moods and moments I was experiencing.
Pencil lines were made using the blind contour drawing method, where I looked at the subject I was drawing, but not at the paper I was drawing on. Inspired by the mixed media techniques of Dave McKean and Bill Sienkiewicz, I later went over these lines with pens, paint and markers.
I scanned my handmade art into the computer and got to coding. Visitors to a Flash website were provided with specific, content-driven means of manipulating my panel layouts to reveal new juxtapositions of images and text. After I graduated, I started reworking some of the artwork I made into six, single-page comics to further explore how Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator could enhance the production of printed comics.
Momentos was first self-published in the 2012 1st edition of Sketches and Streams.
