On Thrusday, we got to set up our own space to exhibit our FMP works. Although our tutors had already set the position of our own space, we had to prepare the installation of our posters. It was not some large preparation, it was just simply insert the pin inside the temporary walls, and waited the posters to arrive for hanging up. Before that, I could not think of how to decorate the surroundings to stick to the theme. It is nice that the classmate next to mine is also doing related topic in order to have something we can do together to make the area better. However, these things needed to wait for posters arrival as I could not think how the effect is presenting. At lwast, we need to wait until next Monday to know.
The time flowed rapidly despite the duration of the Final Major Project was 12 weeks. From nothing to the final work, there were a lot of struggles. As this project was almost self-directed, I got to plan and make up my mind for decisions no matter they were major or minor by myself. LGBT related-project was something that I wanted to do for a long time, therefore, it was not hard to determine the theme. But the problem was how to present the theme, I thought other things such as posters and campaigns. At last, I ended up with making comic, which was quite a good idea that I could mix the interest of doing some moving image by making gif.
Firstly, time management surprisingly helped me because I had not planned about things in a long-term timetable before, I would never thought making a timetable could make my working process faster. I did 68 pages in total for my comic, the time was not much though there was 12 weeks. Since half of the time we needed to research and develop our ideas, it was just a month for me to do. Having a timetable helped me to track my process and prevented from slow progress that led to lack of time. For instance, I planned to finish the idea development and started to decide the storyline before Easter, though I did not finish them before the trip, it was because I set the time earlier. I pushed myself to make up my mind after the holiday so that I could start and work on my final piece at the beginning of May.
Secondly, I learnt to try more on different primary research, such as having interviews. That was the first time I did interview and this time I was also the one who interviewed people. Especially, the topic was quite controversial and sensitive in the first place. In my opinion, the reaction for LGBT community in my place was gentle, but I was not sure since there might be some people did not like homosexual people at all. And it turnt out nothing too special. However, I wanted to be more specific on the questions I asked as I knew all my interviewees. I wanted to know more about the situation of the environment for LGBT people during high school in Macau in order to get more depth on my idea development. My questions could be better with more specific answers, unlike questions like what your school character was inside your classroom since some of the sensitive information would be missed. Instead, maybe I should have asked directly about what your insecurity was inside your classroom.
Thirdly, various kinds of materials were used. I did not try something really complex and difficult such as screen-printing or other traditional printing method, time was rushed at that moment. I was drawing my comic and I was always afraid that I could not finish them on time. Mostly, the works were in digital for my final piece, as I wanted to do animated gif. on it. When I was illustrating the comic strips, I kind of regreted I did not use traditional drawing as facing on computer for a long period of time everyday was not fun. I understand why digital artists were tired as they always need to see on the computer. Nevertheless, I wanted to work back on traditional materials after I have finished my comic story part. Therefore, in order to balance out between digital and traditional when I started to design and use acrylic paint and pastel to do my cover and some of the inner pages. Furthermore, I used orange as they got some connection and it was organic.
The result of the final piece was quite harmonised between traditional and digital pieces. As I used a particular brush on Photoshop in order to create a chalky style, it was kind of intimating some charcoal texture. Therefore, the cover piece was used soft pastels, which they gave a texture on the paper and a chalky texture. It worked well with the comic strips, which having the graphic style to make the story flowed better. For the storyline, I altered the ending and almost entirely changed the turning point of the story. One of the reasons was I would excessed a lot of pages, maybe over 80 pages if I sticked to my original idea, and I did not have enough time and energy to do it. Another reason was that the story was too related to the event I had heard before, which was kind of too extreme and it was not suitable to deliver the messages to the readers. Also, I did not want the main characters of the real event felt uncomfortable with the similar storylines published. For other pages for the comic, such as the quotes from interviews. I really like my idea of putting inside before each chapter, they give the atmosphere when I was reading. Thus, the resonance between audience and the story will be stronger.
Moreover, doing animated gif was tired and met many technical struggles. I understand that animator are very hardworking and they need a lot time to finish a ten second movement. On one of the pages I needed to do the movement of holding hands, it was not fun, I used almost one and a half hours to finish and the result was still not good. The most frustrating thing was that I deleted that photoshop movement which I did not know why. Although I export it out as gif, I could not make any change or I had to do them again. Getting backup file for important change is essential, that what I have learnt.
Overall, this 12 weeks was exhausting in different kind of ways, but learnt and understood many things from preparation to making the final piece. I understand more on my LGBT community and doing comic and making stories. I would do more tradition printing technique next year as I think it would be challenging but I could work in different conditions to obtain more skills.
Got my comic printed, but I did not take it as it is too far away and I was kind of busy with my Bibliography. Therefore, I will take it tomorrow morning, I hope it will turn out great. I am excited about it.
These two days I did all the gifs, but that was frustrating. The reason was that now of my animated gif original data was lost along to making process, although I convert it gif out from Photoshop, I could not edit them again as I wanted to make it two pages in one image file. Leads to the result that I have to remind on just one page for one image.
Anyway, I will get it fix before the submission day. Today, I mainly did bibliography of my secondary research after I went to the printing shop. Honestly, I do not like to do the bibliography but I did it anyway. And I have to move on to the Evaluation of my FMP.
I did change everything for the cover, I thought of many things about the cover on Saturday. It was because that orange mosaic did not match the whole style of the comic entirely, which made it looks weird and not consistent.
Therefore, I redrew the cover with various materials on Saturday. The previous idea of the portrait of Miguel (the main character) was applied again since it made more sense.
I was pretty proud of the whole effect I did, as I did not try pastel very often. Although it was not perfect, I scan it into the computer edit them anyway.
Today, I did not work much, I did my whole cover design by expanded it into 2 pages so that I did not need to try of the back cover and kept the same style of the front cover. As I did not think an appropriate back cover design yesterday. I later layout the whole layout of the comic book into Adobe InDesign and tried to export as PDF, I was not sure about the bleed and other things. My tutor told me to consider the exhibition for the gif, whether it will be a PDF of gif (if possible) or just use Preview on the Mac as it is the only way to show gif. file in movements in Mac default.
Finally, the deadline is coming close, just one week left that we will have to submit all the things. However, many things have not done, I am not stressed since the most important part is done. Therefore, I did some more sketchbook work about my idea development and start to do my cover.
I bought a bottle of glue, not knowing how to open it and ended up cutting too much of the bottle and it could not be closed. I applied them on a coloured paper with the draft of font I did. The whole idea was from the street sign in Macau, that the upper part was Chinese and the lower part was Portuguese. I used knief to cut tiny tiny bits of orange skin. And I applied on the paper as I testure with my draft. The process was not too fun as I spent the whole afternoon to do it. Yet, the result is quite not bad, I scanned on the computer and edit it tomorrow.
As I have finished my comic pages, I want to get some check before I go to the printing shop to print and bind as a comic books. Indeed, I need to design my cover pages and other minor pages (page before each chapter).
My tutor check the grammar of the dialogue and found that I have many minor mistakes on each page. Some of the mistakes should not even there in my level. Therefore, I am thinking about my C&CS essay, there must be some grammatical mistakes that I did not notice though I did check before I handed in.
I left the mistakes and corrected them after class because I wanted to design my comic cover first. I first had some idea focused on the portrait of the characters, but it could make a clear sense as I want to shoe the places in Macau, the atmosphere on it. Therefore, I changed my idea and surfed the things about Macau, the place, the people. At some point, I looked on the ground in Macau, the pavement. The mosaic from Portugal built when we were colonised. So, I developed it and made the mosaic with orange.
Before taking the comic pages to print, I needed to be checked by my tutors first in order to prevent major mistakes and waste of money.
Also, I have to do my cover design and the pages between chapters. I started my idea way back during my comic making process. I just wanted to do in a blank page with a quote from my interviewee when I was interviewing with others. I tried to print a blank orange-coloured page out and I did not find it interesting. Therefore, I started on thinking going back to traditional technique, I created a page of A4 paper with orange acrylic (mixing deep yellow and a bit of red). I used a roller to roll over the whole page and the texture was great and I wanted to develop on it.
Also, I collected some orange skin from yesterday dinner and wanted to put them into something. As they got an interesting texture with a matching relationship with my comic’s theme. I will scan on the computer and try on more effects to see if it is suitable for my content.
LGBT, which stands for Lesbian (L), Gay (G), Bisexual (B) and Transgender (T). They are some of the minorities in the entire population, and alike to other minorities, people within the community has been being criticised, attacked because of different reasons from history to present. Therefore, LGBT people need something to make them stand in the society, to be promoted and let people know more about them in order to reduce the discrimination. On the other hand, for art, it can do so many things, you can use it to express your personal feelings, or you can apply art on discussing world issues. From working art for oneself to the whole world and beyond, therefore, can art also be an aid for people? As artists’ works aim to deliver messages to the audience regardless for the sake of themselves or others.
Thus, this article aims to look more on how art, such as projects and products, helps these minorities. And some of the art projects will be revealed as examples no matter they are for the LGBT people themselves or for the people outside the community because people still need knowledge in order to have more understandings and respect.
Body:
First of all, there was a tragic event happened last June, which was the mass shooting in a gay club in Orlando, United States, entitled ‘Pulse’. Marc Andreyko, the organiser of the book ‘LOVE IS LOVE’, felt unbelievable and nauseated by the fact of how it actually happened. After that, he started to organise a comic in order to fund for the event and raise awareness rapidly. He mentioned, “I just started asking people, and people started asking me … the list of creators is insane.” There were over 250 creators from different kinds of people came to help for the production of the comic and it was overwhelming (Ching, 2016).
(Cover of comic book ‘Love is Love’, 2017)
I bought the book for the research of my Final Major Project, but also I wanted to show support to the LGBT community. And after that, the result was excellent. According to The Washington Post, the comic reached the New York Times’ bestseller list for graphic books. They even literally raised $165,000 and helped the victims and people associated with the Pulse’s shooting, which the act means so much for them and towards other people to acknowledge the event and the struggle of the LGBT community in order to diminish the hate and raise allies for the group through understanding (Cavna, 2017).
Speaking of understanding, I will discuss education on the other hand. In my perspective, through educating people, they will understand the knowledge and be less opposed. However, without some aspects of knowledge, people would be ignorant and resist to the things that they did not learn or they misunderstood. When I was in high school, teachers did not talk much about LGBT-related topics, as they were sensitive and controversial with the fact that I was in a Catholic school. Therefore, the lack of providing information leads to inherit the traditional concepts and misunderstanding. In an article, which was aimed to research on teachers’ commented on reasons they would not educate the student on LGBT-related literature topics. Most of them claiming that teaching these controversial topics were not suitable to deliver the message in classes because of various reasons and issues that they needed to deal with (Thein, 2013).
One of the reasons was that parents or the school would not approve. As the article stated that there were many religious parents and opposite viewer inside the schools, they assumed that there would be a personal sacrifice because those negative voices would affect teachers’ jobs with the disapproval of schools despite the fact that they support the LGBT community (2013: 173). Another reason was that students would joke on the content of the LGBT community, which gave negative effects on those ‘little societies’ when sensitive words spread in the atmosphere of the classroom. However, I do not understand the reasons as the words that making fun and jokes towards LGBT community is due to the lack of education, which I mentioned above. In another word, letting classmates learn more about the community will result in the reduced use of offensive words. The knowledge that teachers give to students and teach them it is not suitable and unacceptable to insult people in the way of whom they are.
My argument point leads to another reason, which is language Arts teachers argued that they were not the one who responsible for teaching students about these topics according to the article as it was not their job (2013: 172). But it shows the fact that some teachers are not doing their jobs as they are meant to teach students about everything rather than just the subject they ‘need’ to educate them, which they were contradicting themselves. Therefore, with education, in this case, Language Arts, they will help the LGBT community if teachers stop avoiding teaches them.
Secondly, as I mentioned about understanding through education, there was a short film project entitled ‘TransMilitary’, co-produced by Fiona Dawson, Jamie Coughlin, and Gabe Silverman. The visual art tells the story of two transgender couple, Ireland and Villanueva, serving in the military with different obstacles regarding the gender norms within the military environment and how they overcame or lived with the standard. In the short documentary, for Ireland, the transgender man, he would not let others know he was transgender as long as it was necessary, in the film, he told his sergeant of his identity and he could be in ‘Blues’, that he was able to wear as a male in the troops during ceremonies. However, due to the military is a male dominated environment, Villanueva was difficult to let the chief to accept from a man to a woman, she was not approved as a female and she needed to wear her male clothing in the army hospital (fionadawson, n.d.). Therefore, the short film tells the situation that helps people to understand more about the situation transgender are facing and how they deal with it. And with the popular media which spread the information and educates people in a large scale no matter for the people in the LGBT community or outside the group.
{Ireland (left) and Villanueva (right), 2015}
Regardless of people outside the community, people within the LGBT group are also having much discrimination, which sabotages the unity of the community. People still get a stereotypical image of all homosexual people as masculine, handsome and lean. Yet, how about the people who are not featuring the appearance having above? Are they not within the community? In a project which taken part in New York City, Thor Stockman was pictured holding hands with his husband of 3 and a half years and was part of Brazilian artist Vik Muniz’s work, life-size mosaics in New York new Second Avenue subway line (Fonrouge 2016). They were in some unassuming clothes with the body sizes that passengers in the subway normally had. It reveals people more about the LGBT community without the glitters and typical standard that the mass media is giving. Also, telling that a gay couple is the same as a heterosexual couple with an average-looking body with different age.
(The Second Avenue subway mural by Vik Muniz, 2016)
Furthermore, it also linked the issue about “typical” in the community. “I also want people to be honest with each other. Berlin is a great place for fun and sex, but nobody wants to accept that they are fucked up and depressed. Nobody speaks about the loneliness of gay people,” said Mischa Badasyan in an interview about his performance art project – “SAVE THE DAY”. He was having sex with 365 men every day in a year. He learned more about himself and grew up a bit, especially having sex with different people such as transgender, HIV-positive men, and straight men. Being loved and being lied, which led to his disbelief to people, and he pointed out that the discriminate within the gay community. Moreover, inspire the hate and devastate during the project, there were messages from people from worldwide sending love and some were even aided by the project. One of the instances is that a Russian man sent a message to Badasyan that he got HIV virus and feeling depressed. However, with the project that letting people know about the topic gave him hope and less lonely (Nichols 2016).
Conclusion:
“People are frightened by female organs because they don’t know what they look like,” said Hannah Wilke (Chadwick, 2012). When things are unclear and unknown for people, they tend to get afraid of them, even hate and violence is formed. Likewise, people in LGBT community suffer in the same situation, from past to present. They even get killed and imprisoned in some countries. Thus, artists create artworks to raise funds; produce educational documentary projects and organise performance to express human fragility and self-identity. They do all these things to have practical aids and assistance and let people understand and learn that people in the LGBT community are also human beings, there is no reason to harm or spread hatred towards each other within this world.
Thein, A. (2013). Language Arts Teachers’ Resistance to Teaching LGBT Literature and Issues. [online] 90, pp.169-180. Available at: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41804391 [Accessed 2 May 2017].
As I finally have finished all the comic strips for my “LARANJA”, I started on other things. Such as covers, the blank pages between chapters and GIF.
For the Gif, I did 3 pages today, as I want the gif to loop to prevent some sudden change of movement, I just focus on doing the looping action on the comic. They were hard to do, the onion skins. The onion skins kind of distract rather happing me when I was doing frame by frame. I think it was because of the brown Lin and the colour made them looked “dirty” and messy.
Therefore, I did not use the onion skins, I just kept moving back and forth between frames to animate the looping action. It took me a morning to finish 3 movements.
Second thing, I start to go back to do my sketchbook in order to fill as much as I can before submission day. Due to the lack of content, I am afraid the idea development will not enough if I leave it this way. Therefore, I put some more idea about how to develop the cover and contents, and I have not start to do my cover design and other minor design for the whole comic and the exhibition. My aim is to finish / almost finish a whole sketchbook.
Having the draft finished yesterday, I started to continue inking and arrange some contents. I found that my idea development in my sketchbook is useful and I could put some of them into my comic strips.
As my original storyline have a bigger climax. When I looked back I felt more strong by that flow of story. However, the plot I used has a smooth storyline with a less satisfying climax (kind of anti-climax). Although it seems ‘less interesting’, it shows more on the culture on the LGBT in Macau with a ‘silent’ atmosphere, with a quiet situation happening anywhere in Macau.
Moreover, talking about the silence, I start thinking about the cover design and I have to talk more about different experiments and inspiration in the sketchbook in order to make more informative.
Wils' 