Before starting my project, my goals were broad–I wanted to make a collection of pages and subpages that could be fairly easily and logically navigated through, and I wanted to accurately capture the emotions behind the sketches I chose to analyze for my assignment. Since Persepolis is a graphic novel, it seems to me the graphics are a major component of understanding and even experiencing the story. Thus, I wanted to focus on what the images were telling the reader that the reader could not necessarily get from the actual dialogue and text.
The challenges I faced when tackling this assignment were mainly while tracing and preparing for my analysis. I traced the pages with pencil and it was hard for me to maneuver the paper while avoiding smudging the lead and thus making the tracings fuzzy. However, to solve this, I tried to go erase all the smudge marks on the tracing paper before I scanned them. Another problem I faced was when adding the gutter text, I realized it was easier for me to write on the tracings electronically. However, I had already drawn the sketches to include dialogue and caption bubbles so when I added my gutter text, I couldn’t get the text to overlap with those drawn bubbles well. To solve this, I decided the gutter text was more important than the sketches looking more precise, because the analysis is my own work, whereas the sketches were traced from someone else. Also, after adding all my gutter text, I didn’t realize if I clicked save, I could never edit any of the gutter text, because it was no longer recognized as a text box. So the gaping “mistake” in my sketches is on one of the pages, there is a white chunk of scanned paper missing and then a next text box over this. That is because the only may I could figure out how to edit the text (after many, many missed attempts), was by cropping that text out of the image and writing over it. However, overall I think the project went well.
Click here to read about the overview of the assignment.
Click here to view my completed assignment.
Here is my revised Tracing Persepolis project!