Working Together
My mother and I have a long history of collaboration. Science fair projects, art projects, and the like. Well, actually, in the past our collaboration has been more along the lines of my mother does all the work and I take all the credit. For example, we “collaborated” and made this awesome pop-up book of the history of Florida for my sixth grade Social Studies Fair project, which only earned an honorable mention ribbon because my mother tried to make the drawings look like an actual sixth grader could have made the project while none of the other parents tried to hide their involvement including the master carpenter who built a working reproduction of a Viking ship and tried to pass the work off as his son’s but practically knocked his son over running to the stage to collect the blue ribbon for himself.
This is often the kind of “collaboration” you get from group projects: one person does all the work and the rest contribute little. Sometimes this is because of the laziness of the group; sometimes it is because one person can’t relinquish control. Fortunately, I can say without reservation that my mother’s and my new projects are 100% a joint effort: we contribute equally and we each offer feedback that enhances the work of the other for a better sum total effect.
Our comics projects start with my script. I write a script with the characters’ dialogue and captions. I also include a description of how I imagine the drawings will look in each comic panel. My mother takes the script and works up some sketches, how she envisions the characters, how she interprets my image descriptions. She then sends me the sketches and I give feedback—if it’s not quite what I had in mind, I’ll tell her. For example, for our story “Natural Disasters,” here was her first character sketch:
After some feedback from me (she looks too young) my mother revised the sketch and here is the final character we used:
My mother will sometimes also offer suggestions about the story—like, I think we need another page or another panel to give more insight into the conflict—or add details to the images that give subtle clues to the story’s subtext. In my next post, I’ll show a little more how we both offer feedback that takes a piece from script to finished page.