Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Upon completion of the course students should be able to:

• Analyze traditional literary elements, such as symbol, tone, structure, and point of view, within various story forms in order to contextualize and structure one's own creative work.
• Identify the cultural, political, and/or artistic inferences that inform the audience’s perception of a story.
• Use written text, image and spoken word strategically to create meaning in public spaces.
• Construct a story from various elements including autobiography, contemporary media, and literature.
• Identify the role of visual storytelling within and outside of different cultural contexts.

• Become sensitive to the way art helps us understand the world and ourselves.

• Develop individual vision, process and understanding through technical, analytical and intuitive methods of art making.

The term is split into two sections: the first focused on printed images and text, the second on community-based images. Folktales and traditional stories provide narrative structure for students to learn to tell more personal stories. Students compare and contrast image making strategies for using similar content in different media.

Graphic storytelling: storyboarding, sequence, image and text combinations for comics, broadsides and illustrated texts.

Community storytelling: possible examples include but not limited to: shadow puppets, street theater, banners, murals and posters.

Create appropriately crafted, challenging solutions to assigned projects.

Demonstrate understanding of the mechanics of a story in a given medium.

Demonstrate responsible studio practices as germane to each medium.

Demonstrate critical language to discuss what is successful in a project.

Participate in class critiques and discussions.

Assessment is based upon demonstrated conceptual understanding, quality and progress of

work, participation in class and critiques, and attendance.

Themes

• Visual communication

• Contextual Awareness

• Image and narrative connections

Concepts

• Form and Aesthetic considerations

• Content and Meaning

• Craft, Technique and Material choices as related to Content.

• Contemporary and historical approaches to art making.

Issues

• Process and material limitations and possibilities

• Technical choices and the creation of meaning

• Formulating an artistic voice

• Audience

Skills

• Ideation and generative concepts

• Creative research strategies

• Critique and self-reflection strategies

• Story analysis

• Storyboarding

• Relief printmaking techniques

• Narrative drawing as in cartooning and illustration

• Community based narrative strategies