Wisdom Tales

In Languages Arts, we read wisdom tales and our last assignment on the unit was to make a comic about one of our favorite wisdom tales. What is a wisdom tale? You might ask. Well, wisdom tales are stories that convey an important message. These messages are morals. I chose a wisdom tale from Greece named Antlers. It is about a stag who is unhappy with the appearance of his legs because they look scrawny unlike his antler which were robust. But then, a hunter tries to shoot him and his antlers get stuck in a tree and his legs help him escape. The moral for this wisdom tale is that everything is beautiful. This moral is important because sometimes we don’t give ourselves grace and demean ourselves. This story gives a moral of loving yourself although the main character is an animal.

There was an illustrator, Brittain Peck, who came in before we started drawing and taught us some basic fundamentals of making a one page comic. One of the things he taught us was to make shapes and then add more details as we went on. Also, he shared the importance of having your drawing have distance such as making the character smaller and the trees bigger in a forest. That indicates that the character is smaller than its surroundings. This is important when making a one page comic because it will tell the story as well. Altogether this project was great because it was a fun mix of art and writing.

I used the Sketchbook app to create my comic. Here are some tips for using this app. For Sketchbook you really want to use layers for each thing you draw for example. On the first layer I would draw the deer, the two other layers would be the background. Why two? Well, the second layer was trees and the third was the sky and the ground. I chose it because if a layer is behind another layer it will not paint over the first layers which means I could take a large brush and just color the sky and the ground. Sketchbook is a great app to create art and it helped me substantially with making my comic.