4. Humor and Irony

"For Pop-Pop From Jordyn"

5"x5" or 16"x24"

Objectives:

-Use an irony (or opposite) TO make up the conceptual nature of your drawing.

-Incorporate visual play paralleled between humor and seriousness (sometimes called dark humor).

1. Use a broken/fractured space

   1. ex: (multiple eye levels) (Transparent images bleeding or blending) (Creating positive/negative reversals) (Broken mirror effect)

2. Drawing must be presented in two or more ways

3. Shape your paper, break away from the 4 corner rectangle

I began in my sketchbook, trying to think of anything that struck me as ironic. I feel like artists often cover irony, leading to nothing new being left. Some concepts are wildly overused, and I felt like I wanted to do something new and possibly even personal. I started to think about cartoons and how they are often sarcastic and satirical. I was particularly drawn to the idea of political cartoons and how they often point out the irony in a political candidates position and ideology or facts about the state of our world.

Cartoons sometimes use irony as a way to joke around and make people laugh; sometimes it is used to make a specific point about something. I was inspired and wanted to create my own Sunday comics which would be ironic and probably not all that funny.

The first thing I did was gather references. I needed to know how the comics were laid out and used the Oklahoman comics page for this purpose. I used to read these every Sunday as a kid, so they are very familiar and personal to me. I also sketched out people in my sketchbook and digitally, trying to find some cartoonish styles for my comics.

Here are the different versions of this comic page. One is line-art, one is black and white, and one is colored. I suggest clicking on the slideshow to see the entire page of the comics. These all deal with different issues and could be ironic on their own. But I still had one more idea to make the artwork even more ironic.

My grandpa used to wrap gifts in the comics, and I found out this is a fairly common thing for people to do. I drew inspiration from this to up the level of irony in my piece. I think its ironic that someone would wrap a present, something associated with good and happy feelings, in comics that are so depressing and sad. A lot of comics are made to speak on an issue, and I think it would be dreadfully ironic if someone were to not read the comics (especially the ones I created) before wrapping a present.

By displaying the comics this way, the piece is able to be rotated and viewed from many angles as you try to read the comics. It also creates a broken and fractured space, especially with all the different panels. I think displaying my art in a 3D way instead of just a regular newspaper makes the piece more visually interesting while also making it much more personal to me. Overall, it was very difficult to meet all the criteria for this project, but I think I was able to make a piece that I not only like, but probably never would have thought of before.