THROWBACK THURSDAY: Representative Government Poster

Throwback Thursday to a time when I wasn't afraid to draw people in profile but probably should've been.

(I didn't have access to a scanner tonight, so I'm afraid this is the best quality I've got, but the text is provided for you beneath the image!)

This text is centered.

Poster Title: Representative Government

Poster Text: Feel like nobody can hear you?

Little Girl: Mr. President! Down here!

Poster Text: Don't Worry! Your senator or House representative will speak for you. They've got you covered!

Little Girl: Don't forget to tell Congress about the turkeys!

Congressman: I won't.

I did a lot of artsy projects in middle school. The teachers were all into having us illustrate concepts, reenact historical debates, chart emotional highs and lows in stories, write songs about government styles... all kinds of crazy stuff. It was AWESOME. I loved to draw back then, too.

This was for my 8th grade Civics and Economics class. It was a pretty fun class. There were LOTS of crazy projects. For example, I had my first adventures with Apple's iMovie in Civics. The first project I did was a short documentary about the life of Ronald Reagan, using the biography I was assigned to read over the summer as the main source of information. Luckily for me, I decided to do Reagan instead of my first idea, Ulysses S. Grant, which was shaping up to be quite a dull project. The other project was a ten-minute documentary for National History Day about the life and tragic death of Jonathan Larson, the writer and composer of Rent. My partner and I spent some stressed-out hours in the computer lab for that project, but it did pretty well grade-wise and in the regional competition.

Comics were much more common assignments than the documentaries or other crazy stuff were. If you think about it, making a comic was a pretty tame assignment compared to some of things we did. I definitely had a lot of fun doing them, though, and sometimes I spent way too much time working on them.

The first time I can remember drawing a comic for homework was in 6th grade for either health or science class. Those were my first forays into sequential art. Since then, I've learned to a few things. As you'll see when I get my next Civics comic to the scanner, I've gotten much better at arranging panels. I also draw human faces better (usually. if I put in effort). Unfortunately, I still can't draw in faces in profile, but I can at least recognize a few things I was doing wrong back in the day. As for bodies, well... To be honest, I'm pretty impressed with how I drew the little girl in the comic. It's been a long time since I've drawn a human body I truly liked. Maybe I'm overcomplicating nowadays. Or maybe I just need to draw nothing but children.