THE HISTORY
The senior thesis in illustration department was a really big deal. Close to the mid-semester of the year, the thesis was assigned. The idea of the thesis was that the artist had almost all the creative control of the project, but the concept of it was as follows:
It had to fit into a profitable market; quick examples would be editorials or books.
It had to have something that would contribute to the market and the illustration field as a whole.
It had to have a sense of style and something unique about it.
And by the end of the year, there was the exhibition as a whole. In 2009, the University of the Arts had one of the largest student bodies in the history of the college, with over fifty students in the class. So there was be two-hundred pieces in total in the exhibition as well as in competition, because only three of them could win the cash and degree prize. In the end, there were four winners in total, a total surprise because usually there were only supposed to be three; in first, the talented Jim Teirney who had made a serial based on the books by Jules Verne, second, Kei Tawara who had made four steam-punk styled fantasy environments that would be used with video game designers, and the two third place winnders, Tara Scolley who made an absolutely adorable children's book series, and then me, tthe creator of a comic making a sattire out of super heroes using a style similar to manga. And what a time that was! I will never ever forget how excited I was.
NOTES AND BACKGROUND BEHIND THE PROJECT
"The Adventures of PSIMAN and PSIGIRL" was actually a small comic I had made when I was in highschool, with no real differences besides my skill as an artist from then and now, and small changes from the original story to make it more pop oriented. And just like in the past comic series: no one character was based on any fictional person. Ian was a red haired bully I knew when I was in Bala Cynwyd Middle School and Lower Merion High School, and we were both artists in our classes. Ian made comics about a superhero about his dog Jaxx, and I was making comics based off my pet hamster Fluffy, so there was some rivalry between that. But he ended up changing. He's a nice guy now. Jenny? She was a girl I used to know when I was in grade school with a mental ailment, and we were friends. Being a nice guy all I wanted to do was to help her because she was getting bullied too because of her condition. She ended up moving away after a couple of weeks.
© Dillon Shea 2009-2010