Visual Association (Version 1.0)
Set it up once, and use it again and again
Update: A slightly different, more direct version of this exercise can be found here.
Visual Association
This exercise is focused on creating an emotional connection to an abstract mark (or set of marks) and then learning to taking advantage of that association in your story.
What you need:
Post-It Notes
Pencil or pen
Paper
Human experience
What to do:
Jot down 5 experiences that had a strong emotional effect on you.
Pick one and write about your experience. Include that happened, how you felt throughout the experience, and any small observations that you remember distinctly.
Using your writing as the basis for the narration of your comic. Begin drawing using literal imagery.
Once you have established what your story is about, transition to writing about a distinctly emotional moment, or a strong feeling or mood. At the same time, add abstract marks (or colour, or texture, or any visual element that is not-representational) to your comic. The goal is to have visually and conceptually link the marks with the emotion you are describing.
Continue your comic, moving back and forth and combining representational and abstract images as you see fit. Bring the marks you’ve associated into the comic any time you want someone to feel the emotion they are linked to. Remember that, once you have created a strong association, any time someone sees those marks, they will act as a visual context for the text and representational images.
See where your story takes you. Reflect on your experience. Remember that life is complicated and emotions are weird. Leave space for your reader to feel your story by not tying up all the interesting loose ends too tightly.
Thoughts:
This came out of the exercises Feel These Feelings and Slow Mutations, in which abstract marks are used to try to capture feelings and communicate narratively. The comic above, Kobi Dog, was not actually a result of the exercise, but rather something that came together organically in the weeks after my dog died. I’m sorry it’s so sad. I’ve made a few other attempts at a comic that uses this kind of visual association, but this one about my dog is my favourite.
I don’t usually love purely abstract comics. I think this is because, while they are often inventive and creative visually, they tend to be light on story. I like to feel logic at work in a comic, I like to know that a comic is headed toward a meaningful destination. I think this exercise is a good way to utilise abstraction purposefully in a narrative and push the emotional content of a story without losing the specificity that literal visuals add to a comic. I think provides a way to play intentionally with subtext without taking away creative intuition.
I plan to play more with this idea of visual association as I think it has a lot of power that I don’t totally understand yet. I’ve seen visual association with colour, characters, visual style, typeface, panel shapes… it can basically be done with anything! I love the idea of loading meaning onto a visual element and then reusing it in a new context, allowing meanings to collide and echo through a story. There’s a fundimental lesson hidden in this kind of thinking! If you crack the code and figure it out (or just have a killer example)… let me know!
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing this stuff.
Something less depressing next time, promise.
xo
f
This is the most accurate visual representation of grief I have ever seen. Thank you so much for sharing, and I’m so sorry for your loss.
Ohhhhh, this is so sad. Yes, you captured grief perfectly. And the not totally being able to see your whole pet (cat, in my case) all at once in your memory of them.