An artist's motivation plays a critical role in shaping his/ her art. The main reason I chose to pursue this course was to learn innovative ways to express scientific concepts to the common man. I have two true love of my life: Lasers and storytelling. Therefore, I chose to narrate a story that would describe how lasers work.

Firstly, I needed to assess the needs for this project. Since the first class, it was apparent that the culminating event would be an exhibition in an art-galley-like space. Therefore, in order to reach a wide range of audiences, the piece must be attractive and obvious while conveying the scientific concepts clearly. Therefore, I narrowed it down to two options: a vintage radio drama or a contemporary comic book. 

Secondly, I made an inventory of the resources available to me. They came down to my writing skills, the copious practice that I had doodling stuff in the margin during lectures, my penchant for graphic design, and my smartphone that can record voices. However, as the smartphone did have the best quality to record voices, I dropped the idea for radio-drama and locked-in on designing a comic book/ graphic novel. The specified budget was ~ 30 dollars.

Thirdly, I started implementing a part of the storyline. Initially, I made a few rough sketches with a fine-point sharpie on index cards and scanned them. I then wrote a small program on MATLAB to detect edges and binarize the images. I redrew the lines with the eraser tool in MS-Paint and filled it in with colours in MS-Paint. Later, I put the pages together in MS-Powerpoint. After discussions with Prof. Smitha, I added in the adjacent pages that described the science behind the story. 

Next, I sketched, scanned, coloured, and designed the additional pages. In order to present it at the culminating event, various options were discussed. Among them were 

   1) Printing the pages on transparent sheets and putting them up on backlit walls.

   2) Having a big-screen TV where the visitors can swipe to see the different pages.

   3) Having the pages printed and framed. Thank goodness for a sale in Walmart, we bought cheap frames and finalized on option 3.

On April 29, 2019, we had planned a dress-rehearsal for the event in Loomis Hall. In preparation for that, I printed and framed the pages. I also printed out a few physical copies of the comics. I picked the size, shape, and the ideal arrangement. Although the frames were laid out on the table during rehearsal, when we saw the venue on May 1, 2019, we decided that putting them up on the wall made it look better.

Finally, on May 3, 2019, we opened our event to the adoring public at Analog: a wine bar/ art gallery in Urbana IL. 

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YAYYYYY!