This past week in Visual Thinking class, I really enjoyed making my collage and seeing the collage's that other students prepared.  When I prepared my collage, I looked at multiple nude model drawings that I had from our nude model session and chose to pick just two of the drawings and base my collage off of those drawings.  I began looking through magazines and thinking about the direction I could venture off to with my collage and started to see alot of faces stick out to me.  I realized that in my drawings, I had not drawn faces, and collaging faces around my drawings could add a different aspect.  I was able to find an immense amount of faces, from the Mona Lisa to Dolly Parton, all of which were able to alter the way that I viewed my model drawings.  I discovered that the pictures were able to add to the drawings of the model and change how the each person viewed the drawings, depending on the face you placed on top of the body.  I enjoyed looking at other people's collage's as well, especially the collage that imitaded the drawing we previously looked at, "the girl walking down the stairs."  I thought that piece was very well prepared and the flow of time was very obvious.
Our next project, the postcard project is giving me alot of grief.  I know the direction I want to go with the project but am having trouble putting my thoughts on paper and explaining them in an art form.
The Scott McCloud reading that was assigned was able to explain the phenomenon of comics in a fun way.  Esxplaining comics by utilizing a comic strip helped to really explain the points that were being made.  The incorporation of the visual aspect added to my personal ability to understand what was being portrayed by McCloud.  McCloud's arguement about how our perception of sound changes comics, and changes length, made alot of sense to me.  When a pictured is seen without captions, it looks still, but the addition of captions and words, adds a dimension that makes it seem as though the picture is moving.  This to me seems like one of the major reasons that comics illustrate a progression in time.  Another important aspect of comics is the "breaks" between images.  This aspect leads to a flow from one image to another, making the comic strip move through time.  McCloud's illustration of this is obvious with his showing of the different shapes and sizes and progressions that comic's use.

Questions:
How have comics grown over time, which aspects that McCloud presents are the newest?

Why are comics more succesful then flip books, when they are so similar.

For research, I decided to look at the Futurists.  We have been talking about the futurists alot and I wanted to learn more. One underlying thing about Futurism is that it seemed to want to instill a change in society, and I think, from reading that it did.  It made people open up to the art piece and look at the piece as a whole, in order to understand.  Sometimes, as I found while looking at the art in class, you can't see what the piece is meant to be until you see the title.  Futurism actually originated in Literature, and was one of our earliest form of abstract.  Futurism did and still does help to open minds to the overall meaning that a piece of art may encompass.