AmeriComics, Part II

Just in time for Independence Day, here are some comics reflecting on my AmeriCorps term of service:

I learned a lot this year!

One of the mentor leaders did work with a student to get her several thousand dollars in scholarship money. So awesome.

Advising at Portland State is a bit of a mess. I’m sure students have similar experiences at campuses all over the country. We need better advising systems so students aren’t taking classes they don’t need!
Materials: Micron pens

Serve San Francisco T Shirts

My apologies for the lack of posts. I’ve been traveling a lot in the past month and I’ve been slacking on my art stuff. Here’s something I worked on during the past week:
I am currently an AmeriCorps member, and I like to help my peers out when I can. When another member of my program needed help with t shirts, I volunteered my services. Her group is going on several alternative spring break trips, and they need to outfit everyone in t shirts. 
This is an idea from one of the students she works with. It was a basic design for their upcoming trip to San Francisco.
However, I wanted to try and give them something with a little more character than a city skyline. I find that it’s really hard to distinguish city skylines from each other unless there are strong visual indicators (like the Eiffel Tower in Paris), so I wanted to do something else. I drew a cable car, since I associate them with San Francisco.
Above is the basic sketch for the cable car, based on some old travel posters I found on Google.

This is was what I submitted to them for the front of the t shirt.

I didn’t veer very far from their original idea for the back.
So I submitted it, and none of the alternative spring break committee members preferred my cable car design to their idea of the city skyline. So I wound up going back and creating this for them:

Below is a rough idea of what the t shirt will look like:

So there you have it. I learned not to mess with a design idea they really liked, because it cost me time and energy (especially because it was all pro-bono stuff). Meh. I still like my cable car drawing.

Friday Afternoon Comics: AmeriComics

Welcome to the first installment of something that will hopefully become a permanent fixture of my sketch blog: Friday Afternoon Comics!

I created the comics below as a response to some personal reflection questions in my AmeriCorps mid-year report. For those of you unaware of AmeriCorps, it’s like the Peace Corps, but within the United States. There are AmeriCorps programs all over the place focusing on different themes and missions, this year I am working in a program called Oregon Campus Compact at Portland State University. Our focus is on student retention through mentoring programs. I’ve gained a lot of great knowledge and experience serving so far.

You don’t really need to know any of that to read these, but they probably make a bit more sense if you do.

AmeriComic 1:

 AmeriComic 2:

Materials: a pen!
I am pretty good at writing in ALL CAPS.