External Motivation

Ideation

This project is personal for me. As someone with ADHD, I've always struggled to find the motivation to work on something whenever I want to. Sometimes it feels like the only way to motivate myself is to be given some directly from whatever unknowable being doles out motivation to everyone. So I made a short, 8-page comic about a day where exactly that happens.

In my story, I am once again struggling to get out of bed, and as I am lamenting about my lack of motivation, I experience a vision of a mysterious being made out of hands. To me, hands have always felt like a symbol of agency, or the ability to have an effect on the world. Motivation as an abstract concept being represented by hands felt like a thematic connection, and a being made out of hands would be one that could represent a being that can control willpower and motivation.

My storyboard mostly remained intact from the start to the final product, but there are some differences. The end result was cut down by 2 pages for formatting and convenience, and the cover and back cover pages were both designed later.

Experiments

The project called for 2 different methods of hand printing the book, so I wanted to keep it simple for myself. I knew that one of my methods was going to be screen printing, but the other method I needed to figure out. I heard that letterpress printing involved using inks and stamps, so I had the idea to use my fingerprints as an easy way to apply color to my comic. I also decided to use letterpress printing as a way of adding the text into my comic.

Screenprinting

The comic itself was easy to print. The relatively thin shapes and monotoned ink made printing go quickly and easily. It was the letterpress printing that was the difficult part.

For the letterpress printing, I needed to arrange a few blocks of type out of small 12-point type and make sure both were in the right spot. I laser cut frames of where the text would fit in the text boxes on my prints. Even then, however, it was still difficult to line up all the prints. Thankfully, I had enough copies of my prints that I could afford to waste a few of them on tests to line them up correctly.

Finally, all that was left was the fingerprinting stage. The hardest part of this stage was cutting specific shapes out of paper to ensure that the parts that I didn't want ink to get on were covered. Apart from that, it was a simple step that only required me to block out the color I intended to put down.

Final Prints

I think that this project, on the whole, turned out well. I feel like I produced some quality drawings, I adapted and persisted through the harder parts of printing, and I have an actual, hand-printed comic at the end of it all. which is pretty cool. There are somethings I would change if I could, like a bit of text not being place properly or some illustrations I could tweak to be a bit better, but I think those aren't important enough to worry about. I'm especially proud of the fingerprinting method that I came up with, as it made blocking in color very easy without the usual trappings of hand printing. It had much less setup and cleanup than if I were to do things normally.